So Ireland’s total number of cases is not 7,054.

It is, in fact, 8,089.

It turns out you can’t just add today’s number to yesterday’s total any more.

Here’s why: [hopefully brief thread] https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1248668726800547846

As we all know there is a big backlog of people who have been “tested”* (had a swab sample taken) but whose samples haven’t actually been analysed, or received a result.

[ * DoH and HSE only consider you “tested” when you have received a result. Until then you are ‘sampled’. ]

While there remains a shortage of lab capacity and reagent to read tests in Ireland, samples from vulnerable patients and medical workers are being given priority.

The HSE has agreed to send unread non-priority (and therefore older) samples to a German lab to be analysed there.

These samples have been coming back over the last few days, a significant proportion of them marked as positive.

But here’s the thing: the Dept of Health is not including them in its daily figure of “new confirmed cases”.

This is a Jesuitical distinction but while these cases are newly confirmed, they are not (in DoH‘s eyes anyway) “new confirmed cases”.

DoH isn’t including them in the daily figure because it says to do so would give a misleading, alarmist impression of actually *new* cases.

This is true to a point: if there were 500 positive samples from Germany and 500 positive samples from Ireland reported in the same day, we’d be talking about “1,000 new cases” which would not accurately reflect how many cases are actually *new*.

But, in trying to avoid one misleading figure, DoH has created another.

By excluding the German samples from its daily total, it ends up excluding them from its headline figure of total cases to date (see the crudely highlighted line below).

The stats on German samples have been given for the last few evening at the DoH daily press conference but it’s only really become clear today that they are not being included in what is otherwise presented as a running total.

It was confirmed this evening that around 14,000 older samples have now been analysed in Germany, 1,035 of which tested positive.

Those aren’t included in the “total” of 7,054. The true total is actually 7,054 + 1;035 = 8,089.

On a slightly more encouraging note it was stressed that these historical cases *have* formed part of the mathematical modelling that @President_MU and colleagues have been doing, which forms basis of NPHET recommendations, which in turn determines Govt decisions on movement etc.

This was all clarified after repeated questions this evening by @ZaraKing and @GeorgeLeeRTE.

In short, we can no longer just add today’s number to yesterday’s total: we have to also add the German samples which are simultaneously both old and new.

So, .

PS: What didn’t help is when @ZaraKing kept asking about the misleading figure of 7,054, she kept being given answers about a *totally separate and mostly unrelated* figure of 7,071. https://twitter.com/zaraking/status/1248715470041239554