Please tell me that this didn't actually happen..

Looks like our Gov is considering extending our current 2km travel restrictions to 5km in the near future. How very, very kind of them.  

Well the government met their target. In fact they beat their target by 20k

Honestly didn't think they would. Credit where credit's due.

Got lost in the melee this morning.

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  Deaths involving COVID-19 by local area and socioeconomic deprivation: deaths occurring between 1 March and 17 April 2020

  
  

  Provisional counts of the number of deaths and age-standardised mortality rates involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) between 1 March and 17 April 2020 in England and Wales. Figures are provided by age, sex, geographies down to local authority level and deprivation indices.

  
  

Listening to Matt H's tone I really got the impression returning to school was some time off and he made it clear it will only be when its safe to do so , also saying he wants it to be back to how it was before they closed.

I don't think Boris will give a date next week just an indication of where they want the virus to be before they consider schools 

No they haven't. They've acquired a shed load of tests and stuck them in the post.  It's still a good effort though. 

Very different here where things are still significantly quieter than normal.

Whether they met their target is a moot point. However, they have certainly ramped up testing massively which is a good thing. Much less clear to me:

1) How many tests were actually processed

2) Who is being tested in pillar 1

3)If the criteria for testing in pillar 1 is being loosened it could be that the number of positives is falling at a worryingly slow rate

We are given the total number of tests that were carried out yesterday and we are given a number for those that test positive.  The number of positive tests can’t possibly relate to the tests carried out yesterday, as the results would not be known yet.  So we can’t say the percentage of positive tests has fallen.  

PS - Yes it’s good that we’re now doing so many tests!  

I wouldn’t want the test because by the time the negative result came back I could have caught it. 

The thing that makes me suspicious is that those free laptops won't be delivered until June/July. It makes me wonder if they will, in fact, write off the summer term and instead aim for a late August / early September re-opening.

If not, then the government has been very generous indeed, and will no doubt now be expected to provide free laptops every year going forwards.

FWIW, my school's rota for staff on site goes out to next Thursday, but the head is expecting it to be extended... the first draft went out until the half term.

As it happens, I will be going in on Monday - a cover teacher has smashed her laptop screen, but has no idea how it happened... can I fix it there and then as she "likes the laptop, lol"... grr, no, she'll be getting whatever clunker I can find in the office instead. I'll be interested to see how busy it is out there on the main roads, and I'll make sure I'm wearing my "key worker" school lanyard in case there are any random checks by the police!

Yes our head has sent an email out with the latest 'noises' saying June at the earliest but nothing concrete. The rest of the email was a few scenarios of how we could implement measures as and when we come back.

I remain of the view that I'd be surprised if we opened up before the summer holidays, certainly not at full capacity anyway.

One of my friends has received one of these tests today. He lives with his mum and one of her work colleagues has been diagnosed with covid-19, so both he and his mum are being tested.

Apparently you have to take the swab between 9PM and 7AM on the morning of the day the test will be collected, as they're only viable for 48 hours!

Today I can announce I have absolutely smashed my target of getting 100,000 girlfriends a day. I have achieved this by posting a very large number of letters to girls.

😅

I assume Gavin gets them from the chart Darren posted that has the latest numbers.

What I think you're saying (and bear with me, my friend sent a maths puzzle on WhatsApp earlier which was engrossing but also draining and frustrating!) is that the number of positives from the chart can't relate to the number of people tested as the data doesn't come back that quickly, making the 8.47% a false figure?

I agree on that one, having given it some thought.

Delete. Posted in error.

This confuses me. Surely the tests reported today are the ones already conducted (regardless of the method) not ones in progress. If they were in progress it would be possible that the number of positives could be higher than the number of people tested, i.e a confusing 100%+ positive result would be possible if the number of tests on day x+1 had declined sharply on day x. And although we see a general increase day to day fluctuations make that possible.

Surely the number of tests (120k) or the number of people tested (75k) is the results delivered today. And, in which case, we could expect an even higher figure in three or more days time.

He is a slimebag. 

Im sick of smoke and mirrors. It’s great we are testing more people or really is. But to claim you’ve hit a target by posting tests that yet are not complete is totally moving the goalposts.

One thing that made me smile today was the Isle of Wight idea. It was virtually the same as the suggestion I've mentioned in here a few times!

I'm glad the government is going along with that, it just makes sense.

TBH I'd much have preferred them to just be honest rather than indulge in sleight of hand rubbish to get to a headline figure. Why not just say we conducted XX tests with an additional XX postal tests sent out. The important thing is we're finally building to a reasonable testing capability.

So to get this straight you can't just divide positives by total now to get the positive rate because Total is differentially lagged?!

Wow that's dumb if true.

It is, as with pretty much everything excreted by HMG, a lie.

Let’s now disaggregate this. The 122,000 total includes almost 40,000 tests posted to homes and patients in hospital. There are no figures for how many of the 40,000 we’re actually tested/processed. Also only 73,000 people were checked as some had multiple tests. https://t.co/4mXt3V9D3O

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) May 1, 2020