Estimating Daily People Tested (part 4)

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

In my previous post in this series we took a look at the weekly count of unique people tested over time using England Test & Trace data. I did a spot of lame numerical acrobatics to convert this into daily data, but this did the trick in that we saw a mighty mismatch between what England’s Test & Trace mob think was happening on the ground and what the UK GOV coronavirus dashboard mob think was happening on the ground. You’d think keeping tabs on who was tested and when would be easy but this doesn’t appear to be the case.

I decided that the Test & Trace mob were more likely to be on the ball and so opted to consider this series further. What I had in mind is determining the relationship between the number of different tests employed and the number of unique people tested. For those late to the party I’ll recap by shouting “De-duplication!”, this being a technique by which the data authorities limit test records to one test per person per accounting week regardless of how many tests th…