Originally Posted by
Walnut
Express freight suggests that an estimated 1 in 1900 infections as reported by the ONS does not bust the Grant Shapps criteria of infections of over 20 per 100000 will lead to Q.
It most certainly does at 39.7 over the 14 days rolling average it puts the U.K. miles over, this being the established criteria as used by the EU
What Shapps has slipped in is his measure is now over 7 days which obviously halves the reported number, putting the U.K. just below the 20 boundary
He justifies this change by saying it alerts the government more quickly to a virus increase
its just smoke and mirrors, as his methodology is not WHO? Practice
politicians will say anything to save face
You are well illustrating the difficulty of trying to compare apples with pears and come up with a meaningful result.
There are two sets of figures derived from two different methodologies:
1. The ONS data estimates the likely number of people who have COVID-19 during a particular week AND the likely number of people actually infected in that week. Those are obviously two different numbers. They estimate that 1 in 1,900 (that's 28,300 people) had the disease in the week 3rd to 9th August. They separately estimate that 26,600 were infected during that week. Those estimates are not based upon testing those presenting with symptoms or who are tested in health care environments etc. as are those produced by Public Health England, but ONS random testing of 122,000 people resulting in 58 positives. They extrapolate that number to give an estimate of the total cases in England.
2. The EU's ECDPC collates data from all the European countries health authorities, such as the Public Health Authorities in UK, to produce an infection rate among those tested under each country's testing scheme with the aim of giving reasonable comparisons between countries and some sort of bench mark for imposing travel restrictions etc.. As I said previously the vast differences in the percentage of the population tested in each country casts doubt over the validity of the figures for each, but it does seem that their figures are used in that way in the absence of anything better.
Are you not using the ONS numbers for England as a comparison with the ECDPC Europe wide numbers to produce your figure of 39.7? I would suggest that this is just not a valid comparison.