I've posted elsewhere but seeking rather urgent help as I'm flying tomorrow. My first dose of AZ was one of the Indian manufactured ones. Am I likely to be denied boarding tomorrow flying to Poland or - worse - thrown into 10 days quarantine on arrival? Panic mode on!

Yes. You can check this on the App, via Services / COVID-19 Exposure Check. Not the NHS app or the Protect Scotland app itself. On the Exposure Notification screen, select the three dots menu on the top right, then Exposure Check. Select any recent record, and it will show a fuller record and a Number of Matches usually equal to zero. On the day of contact you should have several matches equalling one or more. Most matches won't have Covid but a zero record can't be a match.

My kid was notified to isolate today, contact was 6 days ago, so 4 days of isolation. First time despite 12 months of in person work. Several other people at work notified as well.
Seems unlikely to stop spread if you get it that late.

The NHS Covid app is pinging everywhere this week it seems!

Certainly doesn’t bode well for the new cases count in the next few days.

So, just to be clear, you’re advocating the U.K. stops publishing numbers to the Our World In Data tracker (a project funded by the U.K. Government, bypassing normal procurement channels, but that’s by the by…).

I’m not sure joining a group of countries which consists of North Korea and Turkmenistan is advisable. Not least because it would presumably increase the number of countries restricting U.K. arrivals.

I don't want to speak for Silver Fox and Ahmetdouas, but if their point is that we ought to stop emphasizing numbers so much then, yes, I think they're right. It's not just a UK thing, I think most of Europe is in the same boat. Over in Italy, where as many know I've got friends and family, it's the same thing: SKY has a rolling ticker-tape with the number of vaccines, updated from the government website at least twice a day (and if you've ever worked with the Italian gov't you'll know that they consider 2015 stats as "up to date" so this is incredible). It's wrong, in my opinion, because it forces us to stare at the world through warped optics and it forces us to think that we should go for zero cases and zero deaths... which is not achievable.

What you say will make sense once the disease is reduced, worldwide, to the equivalent of the 4 community coronavirus: a common cold. So once the entire world population is immunized (naturally or artifically). Until then the case counts is a useful metric to manage the pandemic that needs to be published on a daily basis.

On the question of vaccine passports if you've had Covishield (the Indian-produced AZ/Vaxveria), it seems there's a bit of confusion - I hope this will resolve swiftly.

While Covishield doesn't yet have EMA authorisation, perhaps that will change if it is officially applied for. However, even if not, there are a couple of ways that this could work in practice.

First: BBC News reports the DoH says they will show up identically in the app.

If this is true, and one assumes that the border guards won't be checking individual batch numbers to see if they have a Z in the middle, there shouldn't be a problem.

In addition, some countries have explicitly approved Covishield directly:

For those who are travelling imminently, e.g. kingstontoon I realise this isn't necessarily very helpful. If I see any updates on this I will post again.

I don't agree that we need to be waiting for it to be on a global basis.

Again, take Italy for example, and I use that country only because it's the one I know. Everyone - from the media to public officials to hospitals and healthcare at large - are ultra-focussed on Covid and I'd say it's largely for the right reasons. It wasn't long ago that there were army trucks bringing coffins out of Bergamo's crematorium. But right now, with vaccinations going the way they're going, cases going the way they're going, it's high time that the relentless focus (in my view largely driven by the media) started to relent. I'm not saying we should ignore it, but it ought to relent. Because, in the meantime, there are about 490 cancer deaths a day in the country (and the latest/most recent data is from 2016!!) and since Covid started it's been next to impossible to run your normal prevention test campaigns. That's going to cost lives. Here in the UK, where I'd argue that the NHS is in a much worse situation that the SSN in (at least Northern) Italy, I've got a friend who's been diagnosed with a non-aggressive uterus tumour. She needs surgery and so far it's taken her 3 months to get diagnosed and she's not even on a list to get to surgery. It's so bad that I'm trying to get her on my private insurance to see if things can be sped up. And that's because of Covid.

What I say does not contradict what you wrote about other health issues. Counting cases is irrelevant to the problem you mention.

Obsessing, though, is. And that's what we're doing in my opinion.

But you're agreeing with people who want the numbers not to be published in official stats at all. They want the numbers hidden rather than not pushed in the media so relentlessly.

I totally agree with the latter sentiment (not pushed in the media so relentlessly), and I suspect that's where your thoughts lie too. I also believe the people wanting the former were just exasperated with the hourly news reports when they posted :)

My personal opinion on tracking cases is that:

1- they should be tracked and made public (I am very pro being open with data and honestly very much appreciate HMG’s approach to data publishing)
2- case numbers should pay a part in the way forward, but emphasis should be shifted towards deaths, hospitalisations and those on ventilation

The approach that stems from point 2 above only works if a country has the following:
- strong vaccination coverage, and by this I mean with a high-ish threshold of at least 70%+ of adults fully vaccinated
- adequate testing, keeping a test percentage relatively low (below 1%)

Only then can we move fully away from being so dependent on case numbers. Singapore is on its way to being in that position and has already announced a shift of moving away from worrying about case numbers and instead focussing on outcomes.

Everybody who mentions the Singapore example forget to add the condition: they will do this once they have reached a vaccine cover of 66% of the entire population.