Should we be looking at confirmed cases of Covid-19 to give us a guide as to how the epidemic is progressing – or at the number of people reporting symptoms? Over the past few months attempts to track the virus have been hampered by a very inconvenient fact: the number of tests being performed has increased hugely since the emergence of Covid-19, increasing tenfold between April and July. It makes reading the data extremely problematic – the more people you test, the more cases you are inevitably going to pick up.
There is a possible alternative data set, however: the number of people ringing 111 to report symptoms. As the accompanying graph for London shows, there is a correlation between the two sets of figures: the number of confirmed cases and number of people reporting symptoms. Both show a peak in April, falling away rapidly through May and June before a resurgence in recent weeks.
There is, however, a big difference: in terms of numbers of cases, the second peak is nearly half as high as the first.
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