The GP surgery I blagged my first dose has messaged to say I can book my second, and have booked tomorrow which is 59 days after my first dose. Earlier than I was expecting!

That’s a nutty thing to say!

The fact that Israel actually maintained some of the restrictions that those urging us to follow their lead actually want to get rid of?

Whoosh! I was wondering too as to what your spell checker decided the word "almond" was a sub for! :)

Scots_Al was sad enough to notice it too and got there first ! :)

I didn’t even get to mention Brazil ;)

And as true covid rates drop, the %-age of false positives increases, theoretically eventually hitting 100%, with every result being a false positive when covid is truly eradicated. Changes to this number are to be expected - it's not the fault of the test.

Daily data:

Cases 2,729 (2,672 last Thursday)
Deaths 18 (30)
Patients admitted 140 (202 on the 11th)
Patients on ventilator 276 (351 on the 14th)
Patients in hospital 1,915 (2,405 on the 13th)
People vaccinated up to and including 21 April 2021
First dose: 33,257,651
Second dose: 11,192,601

The rolling seven day daily average is down 7.4% on the previous week. The hospital data which had not been updated and even showed increase in people in hospital yesterday has been quietly updated and now shows some substantial and continuing improvements.

Lateral Flow Devices have an False Positive rate of about 1 in 1,000. If you do 1 million LFD tests, you get 1,000 False Positives. and here's the critical bit: it doesn't change much by how little or how large the infection rate is.

True Positives, on the other hand are directly attached to the level of infection. Let's say it's fairly low, one million tests, 3,000 LFD positives in all. 1,000 False, 2,000 correct. Goodness, one third of results are wrong. But stoke up the infection rate somewhat to what we saw just a few weeks ago, 1 million tests = 20,000 Positives. Still 1,000 false, 19,000 correct, and we all say that's not so bad.

Hence the importance, in a low level of infection, to do a backup PCR from a postive LFD. In the first case, that would be 2,000 people taken out of circulation with the disease, plus contacts, and the 1,000 false positives get out of self isolation after a few duvet days.

I should know this stuff by now :) A case of engage brain before left mouse button. Hopefully the thousand or so impacted by this received their release papers quickly. And at least I am not the only one here going nuts!

'Auto-correct' can often cashew out :D

I’m so happy for my UK friends. I wish the US was seeing something similar (California is largely there) but we seem to attach more importance to our political tribes than our health.

The Tynwald has agreed to remove the barriers to entry to the Isle of Man in stages from 1 May. By 28 June all restrictions, relating to testing and self isolation, will be removed for all visitors. This is subject to current progress being maintained. Isle of Man is roughly 80% vaccinated at least for dose1, compared to 62% for the UK.

For anyone interested in the variants, the prevalence in the UK is in this table:

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...ce3ac01ab7.png
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/public...data#Variant11

The Indian variant now shows 132 cases here, but the data is currently a week old. The last flight from India before the hotel quarantine kicks in landed just over an hour ago (Vistara flight VTI017).

Note: I misunderstood the date range for the last column. It is saying new cases after 14th and up to 21st. So the data is current.

So when you consider a bunch of those SA variants would of now recovered, it's not quite such a big deal...? 70 in a week hardly screams exploding

Thanks for that. So this is known cases, are there any reliable models that have been developed during this pandemic that predict the amount of unrecorded or unknown cases?

Is the actual (in-the-wild) number going to be considerably more? Obviously testing, isolation should keep this as close as possible to the recorded data, right?