Originally Posted by
Lynyrd
Now that mass free testing has ended in the UK, where will the data come from? Sorry if this has already been asked.
There is still a lot of testing going on. So last week roughly 600,000 tests were done, compared to 1.2 million at the beginning of February. A very large number of people who test regularly anyone for job related reasons (including yours truly) still get tests. In my case it's gone from about 6 tests a week to 2 or 3. The reporting process for test results, whether negative or positive, is still in place and largely automated anyway. So yes, less data, but the reporting mechanism remains in place. I imagine there will be significant further reductions in tests, but there again significant reductions in cases anyway. So there was a 22% reduction in testing this week compared to last week, but the number of cases reduced by 37%, and the positivity ratio has therefore improved.
In a sense this is a looming issue anyway across the world, at some point these relatively expensive mechanisms of reporting will either fade away or stop.