• Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
    ·
    11 months ago

    in England, yeah, there is - it's not as good as it once was and it's getting dialled back more and more, but we still have some reporting & surveillance - you can see the dashboard here.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      If I'm reading that right they did 30k tests and got 6k positives, about 17%. I would consider that enough infection going around to be very concerned. Am I misunderstanding those numbers?

      • Blake [he/him]@feddit.uk
        ·
        11 months ago

        Well, most people wouldn't get tested unless they have a reason to, e.g. displaying symptoms, so that skews the numbers significantly - there's no broad testing happening anymore, really. Number of infections per 100k population is a more interesting metric - I was curious and put together a line graph of that over the last 12 months.

        *removed externally hosted image*

        I think the little uptick that we're seeing recently, is just seemingly part of the pattern of steadily reducing number of cases - there's a little bump, followed by a drop. I'm not sure what causes the pattern, though.

        Anyways, the more in-depth reports have lots of information, one I think is particularly interesting is for google trends in COVID symptoms - that hasn't really increased recently. In general, cases, hospitalisations, deaths, and positivity (i.e. the number of tests coming back as positive) are significantly lower now than they were.