Emergency Exit at English Heritage
12 July 2025
by Mike Wells
News Round-Up
13 July 2025
by Will Jones
by Dr Clare Craig FRCPath The story of how false positive test results can create the illusion of actual infections in the population will be a familiar one by now for many readers of this site. Assuming that the false positive percentage remains reasonably constant, then increasing numbers of tests inevitably lead to a higher absolute number of false positive test results over time. Uncritical policy decisions made without discounting for this effect have no evidenced-based validity. One real potential problem as the number of tests increases, however, is that the underlying number of actual cases – and their location – may ironically be somewhat obscured by steadily increasing and randomly distributed false positive results, caused by the higher volume of testing. By contrast, a rapid rise in the percentage of tests that are returning positive results should normally indicate that the real number of Covid cases is increasing and the false positive results will become less and less important because they are usually constant. Unfortunately, the acceleration we have seen in the recent case numbers is increasingly out of synch with crucial data from other sources. The ONS random population sampling, Zoe App and NHS triage data all show a slowing and even a plateau in the number of actual cases in the last fortnight. Either the data in all ...
15,841 Cases Added to Sunday's Daily Total Due to Technical Glitch "Is that you Dido? Hancock here. Don't talk to any journalists in the next 24 hours." Even hard core sceptics might have experienced a tremor of doubt yesterday on seeing the daily total of new cases: 22,961. Is Witless and Unbalanced's graph of doom going to turn out to be accurate? Er, no. The reason Sunday's figure were so high is because 15,841 additional cases were added to the "daily" total, which, without them, would have been 7,120, which is almost exactly what they were seven days ago on September 29th (7,143). So where did these extra 15,841 cases come from? Apparently, they are positives spread out over a seven-day period between September 25th and October 2nd but which were omitted from the daily totals due to a technical glitch. The Guardian has more. Boris Johnson said earlier on Sunday that there was “a failure in the counting system which has now been rectified”. He told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show it was a “computing issue” and all those who had a positive test had been notified.While PHE said the technical issue did not affect people getting their test results, Test and Trace and PHE joint medical advisor Susan Hopkins, has said it resulted in a delay in cases ...
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