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THREAD: quick overview of where we are COVID wise in the UK from today's @IndependentSage briefing (you can watch me give it here too if you want ) 1/9
While deaths and hospitalisations are low and stable, cases are continuing to go up. We had 1,735 yesterday compared to 544 two months ago. How much of this is down to more testing? 2/9
Increase in England is entirely in the community ("pillar 2"). While we are testing 50% more people than we were, cases have gone up by almost 100%. This means that roughly half of increase in cases is due to more testing (good) but half is prob more transmission (bad) 3/9
In Scotland (H/T @TravellingTabby ), overall positivity rates were v low in early July (0.3%, England has never been below 1%!) but there was a rapid increase end of July. But last few weeks, positivity rate stable (but higher). So recent increased numbers prob cos more tests.4/9
Meanwhile, Test and Trace still not improving. Last week in August, only 65% of new cases gave any contacts & only 60% of non-complex contacts reached. NOT good enough. Also increasing reports of tests being hard to access - v worrying! 5/9
We need testing to be easy as schools go back and contact tracing to be top notch. I also worry slow rise in cases is making us complacent - we got used to 1000 a day, now getting used to 1500 a day. Will we get used to 2000 a day and then 3000? 6/9
In today's briefing I suggested in a week or two being consistently over 2000 a day but then today's case numbers were 1940. Is this an outlier or is transmission accelerating? v much hope the former 7/9
Internationally, we are doing better than many EU countries and about the same as Germany and Italy (although latter seen rapid rise last 2 wks). Worrying that France and Spain are now seeing many more hospitalisations too. 8/9
Finally, focusing, on schools, let's learn from other people's experience. In particular, Scotland returned a few weeks ago - below are our main recommendations based on Scottish learning. Short report will be on website v soon. 9/9
