July 22, 2022

expert reaction to latest stats from the ONS COVID-19 Infection Survey, UK: 22 July 2022

The Office for National Statistics (ONS), have released the latest data from their COVID-19 Infection Survey.

Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, UEA, said:

“It is worth restating that the ONS infection survey primarily publishes prevalence of covid (i.e. proportion of the population of people testing positive), and a week or more later than the samples were taken on which the results are based.  Because people can remain positive for about 11 days after first becoming positive for covid, the ONS data is always about 2 to 3 weeks behind the epidemic curve, as far as new infections (incidence) are concerned.

“Other sources (DHSC dashboard and Zoe app data) have suggested that for England the number of new infections peaked around the 8^th/9^th/10^th July and are now in decline.  The suggestion that new infections are indeed now falling is further supported by the fact that new hospital admissions are also now falling, though I suspect that the next couple of days’ data may be confused by increased hospitalisations because of the heat wave.”

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/22july2022

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.