Data Nerd

 So, the schools have been back less than a week, people are mixing again and the number of people testing positive for Covid is rising again. The doom merchants are thrilled by this. “We told you,” they say gleefully. Matt Hancock appeared surprised. He talked about a worrying spike caused by young people but reiterated that young people should continue to go to school because the young don’t pose a significant risk. 

Personally, I’m on the fence about the whole thing. It doesn’t surprise me that cases will rise with more mixing but I have noticed that with that rise there don’t seem to be more hospital admissions. The people who are catching it aren’t getting too sick. If we can’t stop or prevent a disease (and we can’t prevent all viruses affecting us) then what we want is for it to be non life threatening. It might be too early to say but I’m watching the data. 

The fact that I’m watching the data also makes me less inclined to panic about this rise. Whoever puts these figures on the government website is awful at their job.  I am a data nerd. If they are going to use figures to frighten us then I want to be able to see that data and check its accuracy. Yesterday, the number that were reported as having tested positive has nearly doubled. This is the exponential growth (R greater than 1) that we all fear: the second spike. I wanted to check the number of tests carried out to see if the proportion of positive tests was greater but whoever updates the government website can’t be bothered to put in accurate daily figures and so it looks like the exact same number are tested daily for a whole week. (175687 every day for the last 4 days, 186500 daily tests for the 7 days before that). 

I was hoping to see these rises in more detail but that part of the website hadn’t been updated. 

I haven’t been that worried by increases in positive tests, although a doubling is troubling. (I feel a song coming on). I keep thinking that if the government really do want us to go out and spend our money then they need to calm, rather than scare us.  To calm myself, it’s the hospital admissions, number of people on ventilation and deaths that I look at. These were all steadily falling. Hospital admissions had a little rise at the beginning of September but are falling again. I’d like to see how many people are admitted each day to hospital but the same person who puts the testing figures in must be on that job. I do not believe that exactly 124 people were admitted to hospital with Coronavirus every day for the last four days.

The real reason I’m not panicking about yesterday’s rise in positive cases yet is because I got a little anxious on the 28th of August, looking at the people on mechanical ventilation. The numbers had been falling by one or two a day and were down to 64. Then on the 28th they suddenly leapt to 71 but were back to 60 the next day. 

I know the government are stressed but I would really appreciate it if they could publish accurate data and get someone to check the work of the data entry clerks. It worries me that they could be using inaccurate data to make decisions that affect people’s lives.