UKC

This is getting ridiculous...

So it appears the government have been deliberately double counting the tests, to massage the numbers. The question now is how incompetant a government has to prove itself before the leader gets the boot?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/tens-thousand...

Do you really want a leadership contest at this time?

Could it get any worse?

Patel, Raab, Grayling, etc?

I'm not sure this is news; the count is (and always has been clearly annotated as such), fairly reasonably, of the number of analytical tests performed. If tests have to be repeated for individuals, for whatever reason, the analytical test still has to be performed. The total number of tests performed, and the number of individuals tested, has been published from the outset.

I think the testing has been a shambles, and there have been other methods of fudging figures to hit the specious target of 100k tests, but I don't think this is one of them.

The fact that the Torygraph is critical is quite interesting... Seems even they and the Daily Hate are running critical stories...

Another trick: they have NHS lab tests and tests from private contractors.   They count the total number of tests including those from 'pillar 2' private labs towards their 100k target but only the positives from the 'pillar 1' NHS labs get counted when they report number of confirmed infections or as 'tested positive' when certifying a death.

This isn't about repeating tests, it's about counting a nasal and saliva swab done in the same test as two. 

It's at the level of a teenager trying to blag they've done their homework to avoid detention, not what we should expect from a government

Point taken... my money would be in Gove though and although I dont like the guy at least he wouldn't make everything.worse which boris seems to do everytime he opens his mouth

Rishi Sunak, although not really experienced enough. He and Gove have been the only ones to have looked remotely competent since the election, and especially during the current crisis. At least he has the decency to look embarrassed when blatantly lying (as in when trying to explain the maths behind the increase in the number of nurses during the GE campaign), whereas the others seem to regard dishonesty as perfectly acceptable, and BoJo regards it as plan A.

I have a joke for you...

Two Tory cabinet ministers walk into a bar. 
Because it was set so low.

You're absolutely right that this is ridiculous. However, rather than aiming at Johnson, I suspect this is all designed to line up the scapegoats at the DHSC (namely Hancock) and at PHE. 

and Fox the disgraced public fund expense thief and his crony in MOD meetings!  Now one of the Overlord Great and Good class speaking to us on COVID

it's like the lies on CVs that the Apprentice  candidates have revealed undere scrutiny

I'm sure they would somehow find a way to not reach it......

At least its consistent with the amount of ppe distributed - a pair of gloves counted as 2 items.......

I think they would pass underneath the bar with so much clearance that they wouldn't even realise they had entered!

Gove has a long track record of making things worse. Just look at what he did as Ed. Sec. 

More or Less on Radio 4 is on I think its 3rd week of taking apart the testing figures and showing how the 100, 000 figure is bollocks and always has been.

They aren't really screaming about it, but their pulling apart the figures is perhaps all the more damning for that.

For anyone interested: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

Obviously a serious cock up which had cost the lives of many.

I really want to know how this has all been organised. We have four different health services in the UK all nominally responsible for their own procurement. Scotland has a test capacity that is the lowest in Europe and this, along with a lack of PPE and tracing has caused carnage in our care homes. What is the arrangement between the different parts of the UK? Why are we all bad? Did we all agree to a central procurement strategy for reagents and like PPE, we were too late to order material? Is it just that? Why haven't we recruited tracing staff properly. At the end of last week none had been hired in Scotland, why not? Is it because there's no point without testing?

Regarding individual performances, I have no idea who does what exactly at UK level. In Scotland our FM seems to be doing everything except when it goes wrong when she will use her health Minister as a human shield.

Certainly praise of Rishi Sunak is premature. He set out a sensible strategy but this crisis has only just started for him. Let's wait until December until passing judgement.

If we want to open up the economy we need an efficient test, track & trace system to find & confirm who is and is not infected. If the negative test results come back too slowly people will correctly think it's probably negative and some might not bother to self isolate. Also the economy is damaged because many of those who self isolate & stay off work do so for 7 days when a rapid negative test result would have got them back to work after 1 day.

Tests that don't return a result within 24* hours might be useless. The effort is mostly wasted tracing & isolating contacts of people who aren't actually infected but they only get a negative test result a week later. A quick test result means you can exclude 90% of contacts, they can get back to work and the tracker can focus effort on finding contacts of people who are actually infected.  

*Bill Gates was saying this a month ago, but the government just says "today 100,000 tests" not "today 100,000 tests returning results within 24hrs".

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation

+1 for the 'More or Less' episode. 

Their Germany comparison piece was also really interesting.

Thank you. On the basis of five minutes streaming, I will be following this programme

My ring piece still stings from that one ☹️

If a single swab is used to test both nasal and saliva, and sent for a single analytical test, then it's a con. If two swabs are used, one for nasal, and one for saliva, and those two swabs are sent for individual analytical tests, then it's a fair count. It's the analytical tests that count, because that's what the test labs are doing.

Which is it? I don't know.

I've just done one of the government's tests. It's the same swab on your tonsils and in your nose. Calling it two is completely disingenuous. Even if it was 2 swabs, is still only testing one individual for cv19. Bloody liars.