Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

REACT study shows Haringey in quadrant of London with lowest Covid growth rate

After reading a news article today which flagged up how variable Covid infection growth rates are across the country, I tracked down the REACT (Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission) study that is so often cited.

It's not the most penetrable of documents for the lay reader, but it's worth a look (copy attached).

Amongst its findings are the interesting revelation that our patch of London is currently the one with the lowest growth rates.

Good news - but no reason to abandon precautions!

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Attachments:

EMBARGOED 00.01 04 Feb react1_r9_final_preprint_vs1.1.pdf, 2.8 MB

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Permalink Reply by michaelw on March 4, 2021 at 18:07

REACT is useful for finding out the levels of infection across the population, without any distortion from who actually gets tested, but it is problematic for time series, as it has big gaps of time when no study is being done.

The maps and graphs on the official Government test site are pretty good these days (though not of course for the first months of the pandemic when testing was very limited), even though only symptomatic people are generally getting tested. Here's Haringey's latest graph (updated today) - 12 positive tests today:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=ltla&are...

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Permalink Reply by michaelw on March 4, 2021 at 18:10

The current 7 day average of cases is around the same as it was on 24/25th September, which is good.

However, in September we were not dealing with the 'Kent' variant B.1.1.7, which transmits more easily. The next challenge is what is going to happen to rates in the next few weeks, after schools reopen fully on Monday 8th.

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Permalink Reply by Hugh on March 4, 2021 at 19:11

Thanks. The REACT paper suggests their data is a data set from between 4th and 23rd February.

It’s a useful piece to read alongside today’s news items that report infections going up in London.

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Permalink Reply by michaelw on March 4, 2021 at 19:32

FYI here's some commentary on the study:

"There are some particularly marked differences in London (Figure 7 in the report), where decreases in the north-east of the city are alongside quite substantial increases in parts of the west and south. I should caution, though, that these conclusions are based on quite small samples of swabs within these smaller sub-regional areas, and at changes over a short period between the two parts of the latest round. So I’d say they are signs for caution, not for alarm"

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-preprint-givi...

Also this from Tim Spector who runs the Covid Symptom study:

https://twitter.com/timspector/status/1367514350085357572?s=21