Whilst well to the North of Nottingham, I'm anticipating some fairly draconian lockdown being announced tomorrow.
(Though my council area has two MPs, both Tory and both cabinet members, so just maybe....... ;-) )
Nottingham has, of course, just gone to number one in the charts in the last week, from almost nowhere.
It is worthwhile pondering why. It's nothing at all to do with the returning student population, of course, just like all the other major University cities. :-(
Except, in this case, it possibly is, in spades.
Nottm University is running its own screening program, across all students and staff, and has extended the process to Nottm Trent University.
The screening isn't elective, it is all the Uni population, symptomatic or not.
The resulting figures do not find their way into the official statistics, BUT, if you test positive it is mandatory to have an "NHS" test to confirm (and this overrides the initial result if it proves negative). The NHS results do hit the official statistics.
The net effect of this is to skew the Nottingham results in several ways.
i) asymptomatic positives in the NHS stats will be higher. Normally you shouldn't go for an NHS test if you're asymptomatic anyway, but this process means a significant number will, and are very likely to test positive (since they already have). Stats aren't easy to obtain, but indications are that there are a lot of Uni positives, a large proportion of which are asymptomatic.
ii) as a corollary, the prooprtion of positive NHS tests proving positive will be higher.
I don't think there is a similar process in place elsewhere in the UK. This is no small matter, the combined Uni populations in question are of the order of 80,000 students and staff.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics?
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