The irony was one of my most recent runs was the quietest ever (since the clocks went forward at least)

There was 1 5am dogwalker and 1 5am jogger but that was it.

At 6am when I was finishing I was the only person there . Its the quietest I'd ever seen it at 6am. I put it down to the weather forecast being rainy (so the heavyweight 5amers were around but the 6am lightweights wern't) but perhaps its because people have given up getting up early and are just going at sociable times.

We were running between 4-5k a day for some time, so assume the extra testing is responsible for the increase to 6k? Be interesting if they gained knowledge of those people. Are they stay at homers, once a week out of the supermarket, daily workers etc. That rate is high and needs to be addressed and sorted because it seems somethings not working.

*****trying to score a point from a non-story.

As I understand it two measures have been reported each day: the number of tests carried out and the number of tests analysed (with the results of that analysis).

Now bolt on tests that are being posted out for home testing.  Was anyone expecting a third category to be created?  If so, then they should have reported 80k plus 40k; if not then they have to be added to the first measure. To be fair, how else do you do it?  Do you add a day to allow for delivery?

Ireland has extended its lockdown until May 18th at which point it will start and be eased

People over 70 who are cocooning will be allowed to go out from Tuesday 5th May they should avoid contact with people whilst the 2km exercise restriction will be extended to 5km on the same day

Outdoor work will commence from Tuesday 19th May 

The lockdown will be eased in 5 stages each one will last 3-weeks with stage 5 starting on Monday 10th August

Liar then?

I don't care about the testing

I do care about him telling Gary Gibbon on Channel 4 news that the delay in starting the lockdown was due to scientific advice, not a political choice

Of course, if Whitty, Vallance et al are too frightened to speak out and happy to be put up as fall guys, then that's their problem

Matt Hancock explicitly said 100k tests per day, I checked. And the media reported it as tests per day. Not people.

However the number 10 twitter account does say people. Then again I wouldn't expect a journalist to know how to conduct a simple Google search, seems beyond most of them.

Anyway as mad as these parasites makes me, I'm pretty P*ssed off with the government for f*cking with the statistics again. Almost giving up trying to run my own model as the methodology changes more often than the number of genders.

Arguably it isn't a 'fabrication' as such, because they've provided the information to explain the number. Fabrication means a lie and it's a pretty weird lie when the alleged liar is giving you the information openly upon which you base the allegation.

Perhaps 'deception' would be a rather better accusation, is one is merited.

The journalists were frothing, they wern't making the salient point that the total/positive statistics are now differentially lagged. That is the salient point to be made here.

They were too busy crowing about people/tests. The real scandal is that we now have a set of statistics that don't make any sense. Why is that not the front page?

That's the problem John, when you look into it further you realise actually it hasn't actually been achieved but made to look like it has.

If Amazon dispatched a parcel you wouldn't count it as delivered until it was in your hands. 

No post tomorrow

Is it safe for these samples to be circulating in the postal system? I wouldn't want to be working as postie or in a sorting office

Can you rely on plebs to screw the lids on properly?

Yes - fair point. A deception.

OK I'm getting really confused now because on DH+S it says this:

Pillar 1 tests: 39753

Pillar 2 tests: 79522

Pillar 4 tests: 3072

And the pillar 1 and pillar 2 all have positive rates (pillar 4 is the research gen pop type stuff). The dept says this:

Daily totals reflect actual counts reported for the previous day. Each day there may be corrections to previous reported figures. This means that previously published daily counts will not necessarily sum to the latest cumulative figure. It also means that today’s cumulative count may not match the previous day’s cumulative count plus today’s daily count.

The number of tests includes:

• tests processed through our labs


• tests sent to individuals at home or to satellite testing locations

So which is it?

Is it differentially lagged or not. This says it isn't.

Prof Newton said: “For any tests which go outside of the control of the programme, they are counted as soon as they leave the programme. That’s for the tests that go out to people home and in satellite centres.”

OK so there is a differential lag but its been going on for a while. When did this start, has this been happening the entire time?

If this has been going on the entire time then it becomes a matter of merely how statistics have been presented. I.e no data massaging at all.

And this, FYI, is why I'm pissed off with journalists. I don't have time to be going through paper trails and working all this stuff out myself. A good journalist should do all of this work for me. That's what they are paid to do.

Anyway from what I can gather the statistics have been presented like this for a while. So the govt didn't do this deliberately to inflate their numbers at the last minute. Not that presenting the statistics in this way doesn't annoy the hell out of me. With a differential lag in the data it kinda makes any positive rate numbers worthless.

Somebody is being deceitful. No 10 was pretty clear about it on April 5 - it was to be 100k people tested per day by the end of April.

We’ll test 100,000 people a day by the end of this month.

Here’s how ⬇️https://t.co/U5gd1mWwdO pic.twitter.com/DJzWDj0vv7

— UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) April 5, 2020

Italy

• 1965 new cases 


• 269 new deaths

Journalist A: The government may have reached their target of 100k targets a day. But there seems to be a wierdness in how they present their data:

Journalist B: How so?

Journalist A: The tests are counted at the point of delivery and the positives are counted at the point of receipt

Journalist B: How long has this been going on for?

Journalist A: I don't know, feels like a lot of work to go into this.

Journalist B: I found a tweet where they said 100k people instead of 100k tests. We could run with that?

Journalist A: But that's clearly mistake in the tweet, anyway we said their target was 100k tests too. People will notice.

Journalist B: No they won't. We could look into the how the stats are presented instead

Journalist A: Nah that's too much work, do the tweet thing.

No its a mistake in the tweet. Took me 5 minutes to work this out.

Literally every major media outlet I can think of reported it as tests not people at the start of the month. And in Handcock's own words.

“I’m now setting the goal of 100,000 tests per day by the end of this month. That is the goal and I’m determined we’ll get there.”

So what the journalists did is take a small mistake in a tweet, pretend that was #10's official policy and then try to claim some mismatch where non exists. This was despite the fact they all reported it as tests rather than people originally.

I am completely brassed off by the broadcast media - talk about bloody churlish!

Matt Hancock deliberately set a stiff target to push the PHE bureaucracy into ramping up test capability and they have achieved it. But instead of celebrating that humungous achievement, all we get is carping.

Sod the bloody BBC and Channel 4 News - point is that we now have a foundation to get out of lockdown - mass testing and contact tracing to follow - let's at least celebrate that!

To be honest I don't think the people at buzzfeed or the canary or novada media or whatever could possibly even comprehend a differential lag and why there is a problem with it.

There is a real story here, but they can't be bothered to do the leg work.

Instead lets make a story out of a goddamned tweet.

Media are useless. Absolutely useless.

It was shown yesterday.

I agree that this is not really terribly important but the optics do matter on this.

Most reasonable people would assume that ‘100k tests per day’ meant tests carried out, not tests ‘in the post’.

It doesn’t matter except that is clearly a desperate effort to get the weasel Hancock off the hook.

Testing is clearly being ramped up massively and that is to be welcomed. Hopefully we can start letting people out again soon although I am rapidly becoming of the opinion that this is an opportunity to change the way societies and economies work which should be grasped.