temptar wrote: ↑Tue Dec 28, 2021 1:10 pm
Yesterday and today are bank holidays. There are countries which didn’t even release numbers across Christmas Day including the UK. I don’t have a computer to hand so I can’t help you navigate figures and how the stats are managed.
That being said, you are the one who did not want to believe Irish media sources on the question.
I gave you quick access to the numbers. They were not false as you asserted.
Those numbers were published as official figures on pretty every media channel.
And I'm also the one who actually looked at the numbers and answered the question implicit in the OP, that the high positivity rate corresponds to fewer tests being done and not because of tests "performed on the symptomless for routine reasons (travel etc.), and they're found to be positive".
Thanks for posting the link to the twitter which presumably scrapes the numbers off the official portal each week day. Actually it turns out that if you download
the csv of the Testing time series off the portal it's fully up to date, it's just the preview which only goes up to the 22nd. And it also includes the weekends, which the twitter doesn't. So here's a plot of that:
- covid-2.png (33.58 KiB) Viewed 2331 times
The testing numbers aren't actually the same except for today, but there's presumably some protocol for correcting/updating the numbers for older dates as data comes in later? (The "Test24" column in the csv always corresponds to the difference between "TotalLabs" today and yesterday even if that's not the number which was on twitter that day.)
There's only a "Pos7" column corresponding to the new positives in the past 7 days, not a Pos24 corresponding to the past 24 hours, but I can take the difference between two rows in the Positive column for myself. Also here, the older numbers aren't the same as those given on twitter.
The Department of Health was today notified of a further 6,735 cases of Covid-19 in Ireland. The positivity rate is 49.7% - meaning almost half of the swabs taken were positive.
Actually,
yesterday's twitter said 6,539 cases, and the csv currently suggests 6,578 yesterday, so where is "6,735" from? Are some of the cases in that total updates to older days? Where would I find an official source for "6,735"?
It's also misleading to quote that number without the context of the 7-day average having been heading up to 9,000-10,000 per day (i.e. this case number is a lot lower than usual) and without pointing out that only 13,419 (twitter) or 13,617 (csv) tests were carried out compared to the more usual ~35,000-40,000 last week (i.e. a lot fewer tests than usual) both of which pieces of information would have helped answer the question in the OP immediately.
(Twitter cases / twitter tests = 49.73% positivity rate for that day, CSV cases / CSV tests = 48.31%.)
(If you look at
the UK's official covid portal now you can see that even if they didn't update it over the Christmas weekend, case numbers for England have been filled in for each day already;
testing data never updates over the weekend and always reports the previous day so that will catch up this evening.)