I know what they are doing. They are relaxing the lockdown defacto with the hope R0 will push up but still be below 1.

In other words I have to pay for COVID scroungers. Pissed off in equal mesaures with the government and the covidiots for this.

It was a political choice based on the scientific advice at the time. Personally, I think the Government should have done a lot more sooner, including specifically port screening and border controls, but if the Government is given duff advice there is a problem. It has transpired that bete noire Dominic Cummings was asking the SAGE experts (when he was an observer at the SAGE meetings), why they were delaying the lockdown.

I mean the govt could equally have targetted 80k people per day and the result would have been the same. I suppose its not a round looking number. The logic, I guess, in reporting tests/day or testing capacity is that its impossible to know, presumably, how many people need to be tested twice so that figure would be variable and hence something that would be more difficult to fix a target to.

So I don't blame the govt at all for the tests/people thing. I think that is a total non issue.

What I do want to know about is this lag in the confirmed vs the positives. That's important because it affects the data in a very meaningful way. This is what we should all be talking about.

This thread has got more into the real topic than any of the talking heads like PissedOn - bloody Peston has been worse than useless, as has Hugh Pym and most of them. The only time it is worth listening to the news or current affairs is when they get an actual scientist on (which for the BBC is never during their main bulletins for some reason).

There is plenty to criticise, but all the regular journos are interested in is a GotCha moment!

But look if PHE has been reporting in this way all along and the government merely designed their target around making the tests figure 100k by the end of the month then this puts them in a positive light. i.e the government met their target and did not massage statistics.

The worst you could say, at that point, is the govt wasn't stronger in making the statistics more informative. But that's it.

I swear its the oxford PPE graduate culture. How many of these journalists have a science degree?

And yes exactly. This forum thread has talked more about the issues than any of the journalists have. Its ridiculous.

I'm sick of Peston (and I used to work with him and found him very pleasant back in the early 2000s). Yesterday, he actually said: "good to have you back, Prime Minister".

There is obviously a big difference between test numbers and the number of people tested, so I'm not alone in making a mistake! 

There is still no reason for anyone on the forum to call out someone as a slimebag.    

OK I think I've managed to piece it together.

On the 27th April PHE started sending out testing kits. For, presumably, logistical reasons they counted the tests when they sent them out. Tests returning would arrive on different days and potentially pose difficulties keeping track of them. Also they may have reasoned that the lag might actually be larger (in the other direction) if postage had caused a bigger delay. Positive test results continued to be counted when they were received. So really the only story here seems to be that when tests were sent out to private homes they counted them before rather than after. And the reasoning might be that the 'positive result' would have been conducted on the same day so the lag time would be relatively small wheras there could potentially be an issue with postage taking days and different locations posting back at different times. They might also have reasoned that different labs also report at different times so the differential lag is already built in.

It is subjective of course, Jon. But Hancock has form and has lied and dissembled on multiple occasions.

Weasel is a more accurate description.

N.B. O'Learly is a horrible person - really unpleasant - even I can see that - but he would not have got to where he is if he did not thoroughly understand the business he is in and the bottom line when it comes to bucket cheap flights. O' Leary has now said that the 2020 summer sun season is dead, he is laying off 3,000 Ryan Air staff across Europe and that is completely understandable under the circumstances. The bigger question is whether the days of the cheap package holiday will ever come back. Optimists say that Brits, Germans, Danes, Dutch, Swedes and others will be bronzing themselves on the beaches of Greece, Spain and Portugal next year, but I somehow doubt that - even O'Leary only expects @ 40% of normal holiday traffic in the summer of 2021.

We shall see.

It's all about degrees of stealth. They said the same the last time and the time before that.  

We have a 'health minister' in charge here who didn't even know what the '19' stood for in 'Covid-19'. Yet he gets to dictate how long more the Irish are to be imprisoned. 

O'Learly clearly knows his job very well but to be fair it has been obvious to a number of us on this forum for weeks that summer 2020 sun season is dead. As I mentioned we cancelled our summer holiday weeks ago. 

I reckon Hancock deserves a lot of credit for getting as close as he did to 100,000. Pity he had to spoil things by obfuscating over tests sent ot but not returned - I'd have been much happier and indeed just as prepared to congratulate him if he'd said (I approximate) 80,000 results and 20.000 postals pending.

Interesting read.

US germ warfare research leads to new early Covid-19 test

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/us-germ-warfare-lab-creates-test-for-pre-infectious-covid-19-carriers

The government deserves credit for massively increasing testing in the last month. However, Hancock would have been better off a) not setting an arbitrary target b) not manipulating the stats to get a headline 100k+ figure today. I would blame the low level of political discourse in this country. Politicians, public and press all share the responsibility for the sorry state of affairs.

Decided to test out a mask this afternoon because I had to go to Aylesbury. One problem I encountered is that the face unlock on my phone stopped working. 

A 9-year-old who died in Switzerland has turned out to be a 109-year-old after an error in the fax mistakenly put the birth year as 2011 instead of 1911.

It's the 2nd time Switzerland has got the age wrong after 27-year-old who died turned out to be 87-year-old

https://www.thelocal.ch/20200429/nine-year-old-corona-victim-was-actually-109-switzerlands-fax-based-reporting-system-causes-confusion

You need to add an ‘alternative appearance’ (assuming you use an iPhone which I would say is a near cert 😛)

Apologies if already posted but here is the Irish roadmap of loosening the lockdown. Have given dates but at this stage i guess they are just a guide and subject to alteration depending how things go. They have schools going back at the start of the 2020/21 academic year. 

https://www.gov.ie/en/news/58bc8b-taoiseach-announces-roadmap-for-reopening-society-and-business-and-u/?referrer=/roadmap/

You can retrain it with your mask on and then just keep the mask on 24/7 

And stop showing the comparison chart with other countries, because we are now top of the league of death!

What is the point of all this testing if there is no contact tracing to go with it like they do elsewhere

People testing positive are simply told to self isolate, no attempt to track people they have come into contact with, because we don't have the infrastructure, which is why so many tests are self done, not by clinicians.