Corona centrist here. Yes, REACT is bad, and confirms we are now at a very substantial fraction of Wave 1. But please don't quote these regional R numbers without confidence intervals. E.g. Round 6 says SW is "anywhere between 0.89 and 3.79" (see bottom right corner).

Personally I'd say there's not enough data yet to say much on local trends yet, the non-Interim report in a couple of weeks should make it clearer. In the meantime the Round 5 to 6 numbers (top right) are less alarming and consistent with other estimates. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/research-and-impact/groups/react-study/real-time-assessment-of-community-transmission-findings/

I mean, London R 2.86, anywhere up to 4.87? If R0 was 3 (ok, estimates vary), and 20% of Londoners have been infected, even if everyone was acting like they did in March you shouldn't get R above 2.4.

Meanwhile North East R 0.57, anywhere down to 0.07? 0.57 is the kind of value we got to under full March lockdown, and I don't personally think you could get 0.07 even under full Wuhan gunpoint methods.

The raw data is available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WNnVsEP3NLipDozliXJqtwhbgCHyfk_OE13F0-SPdZE
for anyone who wants to play at home.

For example, for the South West successive days go
7,3,7,8,4,13,6 positive tests out of 993,898,1352,1137,1114,1101,614.

Pick a trend out of that. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

But none of this statistical nerdery should distract from the key national message: prevalence is up, there's no strong evidence that anything we've done so far has reduced R by anything like enough, we have a serious problem.