Re your question about whether the Zoe or official numbers are likely to be correct in the UK.
It seems likely that it’s Zoe, based on other data and on the physical situation.
The other data source is the Office for National Statistics. They’ve been running a sampling study, going out and testing the population. They are finding very high levels of infection. It’s about 1 in 16, or 3.4 million people in England who would have tested positive a week or two back. (Plus some more for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.) That seems very compatible with Zoe saying 340k cases per day across the whole UK.
The relevant information about how things are going is that there has been a massive change in testing. People in the UK used to be able to request a free pack of 7 lateral flow tests to be delivered by post every day. As of today, those are no longer available. Officially, over the last few weeks you could still order them every 3 days, but in practice they have been almost completely out of stock.
The guidance and general tone has also changed, with much less attention to COVID in general and on testing in particular.
Given that tests are so much less available, it’s almost surprising that as many cases are being detected as are.
Agree with this, though I wouldn’t trust ZOE numbers going forwards.
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1509563756644286464 this is the mostuseful estimate I know of at the moment (comparing the ONS survey, case numbers adjusted based on the ONS survey to compensate for ascertainment, and ZOE) - note that ZOE has generally been unreliable since Omicron, but it does nevertheless seem to be true that cases are currently higher than the January peak.
Re your question about whether the Zoe or official numbers are likely to be correct in the UK.
It seems likely that it’s Zoe, based on other data and on the physical situation.
The other data source is the Office for National Statistics. They’ve been running a sampling study, going out and testing the population. They are finding very high levels of infection. It’s about 1 in 16, or 3.4 million people in England who would have tested positive a week or two back. (Plus some more for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.) That seems very compatible with Zoe saying 340k cases per day across the whole UK.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/latest
The relevant information about how things are going is that there has been a massive change in testing. People in the UK used to be able to request a free pack of 7 lateral flow tests to be delivered by post every day. As of today, those are no longer available. Officially, over the last few weeks you could still order them every 3 days, but in practice they have been almost completely out of stock.
The guidance and general tone has also changed, with much less attention to COVID in general and on testing in particular.
Given that tests are so much less available, it’s almost surprising that as many cases are being detected as are.
Agree with this, though I wouldn’t trust ZOE numbers going forwards.
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1509563756644286464 this is the mostuseful estimate I know of at the moment (comparing the ONS survey, case numbers adjusted based on the ONS survey to compensate for ascertainment, and ZOE) - note that ZOE has generally been unreliable since Omicron, but it does nevertheless seem to be true that cases are currently higher than the January peak.
On China: apparently Our World in Data was only reporting symptomatic cases for consistency with earlier in the pandemic, but almost all of China’s positive tests were asymptomatic (see https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1509069309011808256)