Estimating Daily People Tested (part 5)

Estimation of the number of people undergoing virus tests in England prior to de-duplication of data records (rev 1.0)

In my previous newsletter in this series I opted for a spot of linear regression to tease out the relationship between the number of unique people tested, the number of tests undertaken and the number of cases detected on a daily basis, the idea being to predict the number of people tested from tests and their outcome. I ended by revealing a rather tasty model that accurately predicted the number of people tested for the period 8 Dec 2020 - 27 Dec 2020 (n=333). Today I shall reveal modelling results for the subsequent periods of 28 Dec 2020 - 20 Feb 2022 (n=420) and 21 Feb 2022 - 7 Jun 2022 (n=107).

Just To Recap

These are the three periods that mark the three different ways in which the UK GOV coronavirus team went about book-keeping to obtain the daily number of unique people tested as opposed to the number of people taking tests. There is a difference and that difference is important, the former being a count limited to one test result per person per week regardless of the number of…