Vocal Voices

The first figures are in.

8,117 people tested positive but only 5,407 provided details of people they had come into close contact with, about two thirds. There were 31,794 contacts identified by the system, but only 26,985 were able to be contacted and told to stay indoors. Of the 26,985 who were reached some 4,809 were incorrect, did not respond or refused to self-isolate leaving 22,176 who were prepared to play ball.

So basically the thing is only about 45% accurate. Yet given all that it shows that one person infected has the potential to pass it on to four others. Of course 'potential to' is not the same as 'is doing' but it is still quite a high ratio showing that we still need to take care.

Have seen one report that it will not work in a tower block

Smart meters won't work in our building -no /weak signal----so would trace @ track work?

It's not really to do with tracking you on GPS like you were wearing an ankle bracelet * , Vic, as I understand it. It's more about the Sweeney invading your privacy and Denis Waterman getting you to cough up your associates.

* Not speaking from experience here, just to be clear.

Yet given all that it shows that one person infected has the potential to pass it on to four others.

That's what immediately struck me, Frank. Worrying. Does it not also blow a huge hole in the R-number philosophy?

Our local BBC station were talking about this yesterday, about how Birmingham councillors and local MPs have put together a report about how it’s failing in the area.
It stated that only around half of positive cases were contacted by the tracers and the number of contacts supplied by them worked out, on average, as less than one per person.

A theory given was that the information supplied was in English only.

You work with numbers, Ossie, so you know that the numbers game is sound, it's us humans who are the spanners ....

Jo, that's a poor excuse from the MPs and it does not fit the numbers, but it does fit an agenda.

Exactly what I said to John when I heard it, Frank.

The ONS now says that round one in 1,700 people were infected between 25 May and 7 June in the UK, but the analysis is from 19,933 people from 9,179 households as has been the case since the system started. It has changed from 1:1000 for the previous period and 1:400 before that.

The numbers are for a control group, so not real world figures, and even then they amount to 39,500 active cases - about 1200 deaths per week. We are not out of the woods yet.

Completely ignoring the fact that antibody testing in London has returned a consistent 17% of people who have had the virus.

Some US states are reporting antibody tests as prior cases and suspected deaths. Whilst we still get the blathering BS from all the work going on. We will not know how many people have had it until we antibody test 100% of the UK population.

In the meantime the UK Aces testing and is, by far, the highest number of tests in the EU. One the key pillars of unlocking the lockdown. This is not a small difference, the UK will be 50% more than Italy, Spain and Germany tomorrow.

I guess it will be what it will be. Here in France it is just get on with it time. We went down the local town bar on Tuesday night, staff wearing masks, nobody else wearing masks, people both inside and outside.

Life goes on.