Updated: See the latest coronavirus news here.
As the UK adjusts to life under lockdown, one daily event is becoming a morbid mainstay of people’s new routine – the government’s release of coronavirus infections and deaths.
The ever upward trend of figures is a necessary yet chilling reminder of why our lives have changed beyond recognition in just a few weeks.
So it’s important you fully understand them. Let’s start with the basics…
What are the current stats?
The UK government currently reports two figures on a daily basis – total deaths and total infections.
Total deaths
The timeframe for recording this data was changed this week: NHS England went from recording daily deaths and publishing the figure at 5pm to recording a 24-hour period from 5pm to 5pm, and releasing those figures at 2pm the next day, via the Department of Health and Social Care.
This change of timeframe accounted for what appeared to be a large increase in deaths between March 24 (28 deaths announced) and March 25 (107 deaths announced). In fact, the March 24 figure only took into account eight hours’ worth of UK data.
As of 5pm on March 26, 759 patients in the UK who had tested positive for coronavirus had died. Those figures were released on Friday at 2pm.
(Incidentally, the three other nations in the UK have continued to release their own deaths figures throughout the day, which news outlets have in some cases combined with the rolling total from the previous day with varying levels of transparency.)
Total infections
This data shows the number of people in the UK who have been tested for coronavirus and, of those, how many have tested positive.
A total of 113,777 people have been tested, of whom 99,198 were confirmed negative and 14,579 were confirmed positive.
What do they tell us?
You’d be forgiven for thinking the official UK government figures on total infections and deaths from coronavirus would tell you exactly what they say on the tin, but unfortunately it’s not that simple.
The two sets of figures vary greatly in just how accurate and useful they are. Kwiziq CEO Gruff Davies has been putting a PhD in Medical Physics from Imperial college to good use by modelling the pandemic and is unequivocal in which set we should not take too much notice of.
“Deaths is the only reliable statistic,” he told huffPost UK. “I’ve only been looking at death rates. The infection rates are basically too unreliable and too volatile.
“There’s just no way to reliably interpret that data.”
Why are infection rates unreliable?
The laboratories that are conducting the tests in the UK are obviously under great pressure and some tests are being prioritised over others.
This means the government figures for each day tell us the results of tests as they come in rather than the date when someone was tested because they were displaying symptoms of coronavirus.
This has led to large variations in the reported infection rates day-to-day that don’t reflect how the virus is actually spreading.
Sheila Bird of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge told HuffPost UK she believed the government should start reporting infection rates week by week rather than daily as this would give a far more accurate idea of the spread of the virus.
“It’s important that we know the sample week – not the week the test was reported, but the week the sample was taken from the patient,” she said.
“It’s this date that characterises the state of the epidemic.”
What do they not tell us?
A number of things, most critically the exact number of infections in the UK and therefore the “state of the epidemic” that Bird mentions.
The huge majority of tests are only being conducted in hospitals and people with mild symptoms of suspected coronavirus have been told to stay at home meaning they are not being officially recorded at all.
So how many people in the UK are actually infected?
“You probably want to multiply [the official infection numbers] by at least 20,” says Gruff.
Currently that means a total of somewhere in the region of 290,000.
What about how the infection figures are presented?
Currently the official government figures are presented in the following format:
As of 9am 27 March, a total of 113,777 have been tested: 99,198 negative. 14,579 positive.
The government could make one very simple change to this that would vastly improve the usefulness of the figures. “The percentage of positives is the crucial thing,” says Bird.
As the sample size for testing is limited due to the number of tests available, the official infection figures only reflect this small section of the population.
Adding the percentage of positive cases combined with Bird’s suggestion of weekly reporting would make them significantly more informative, she believes.
What about the death figures?
There will be some discrepancy in the official death figures but nowhere near as large as the infection rates.
Like testing, deaths in hospitals are the only ones reflected in the daily government figures.
These will be highly accurate as anyone with coronavirus symptoms severe enough to be fatal will likely have made it to a hospital – but there could be a handful of cases (perhaps those in care homes, for instance) that aren’t being officially recorded in the daily figures.
Anything else?
Currently there is no breakdown at all of who is dying yet. We have indications from other countries that certain demographics are more at risk than others.
We already know that the elderly are particularly susceptible but data from Spain shows men of all ages may also be more at risk.
So what does this all mean for me?
Stay indoors – follow the official government guidance for social distancing and self-isolating if you or anyone in your household has symptoms.
By all means, read the daily figures updates, but don’t base your behaviour on them – for instance, by relaxing social distancing or stopping self-isolating if the figures look positive from one day to the next. You could be putting yourself and vulnerable people at risk.
