THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
TRYING to get your head around all of the different statistics is no easy task.
The different pillars of detection of cases, the frequency of symptoms in NHS 111 triage data, hospital admissions and fatality rates are all very confusing.
And there are many local statistics – it’s so easy to get lost in the numbers.
The nature of this virus makes it even more difficult. If we were to see a second wave, it would first show in the calls to NHS 111/999, but that wouldn’t happen for several days or even more due to the incubation period of the virus.
There would then be a further delay before it started to show up as new reported infections. Fortunately, NHS Digital are on top of this and are able to provide a first-class national data monitoring service.
Sadly the fatalities we are seeing today are from infections which took place weeks ago, as it takes time from the development of symptoms to the serious lung changes and subsequent decline.
The reported infections is the best indicator of overall control of this pandemic. Telephone enquiries can give us the initial warning but confirmed infections are key.
The rolling average for new infections is now well below 1,000, it was over 2,000 a month ago and it has gone above 6,000 on occasion per day.
Seeing it in three figures is encouraging, but we need to force it down further.
One figure that is not as useful is the R value. We’ve seen recently in Germany how that number can leap around, as infections become lower the R value becomes more volatile and erratic.
It jumped up to more than two due to a local outbreak, but quickly reduced back to below one.
We are seeing positive movement on the statistics. We will see more daily ups and downs as the numbers become lower, but overall we are making progress.