Case Data

Case data is provided by Public Health England. Lab-confirmed positive cases are attributed to the day the first specimen was taken from the person being tested (the specimen date). Each day new cases are reported, but the dates they originate from cover the previous few days. Because of this, there are few cases reported for the most recent date on the chart, but this does not mean the epidemic is tailing off. Data from around 5 days ago can be considered complete. Data for recent days are constantly being revised as more information becomes available. More information on case data can be found here

Death Data

Regional death data is provided by the NHS - it only includes deaths in hospitals. The NHS categorise their data by NHS Trust, rather than by Upper Tier Local Authority. As a result, in order to display deaths by local area, we have mapped NHS Trusts to Local Authorities. There are a couple of uncertainties that should be taken into consideration when looking at death data.

Firstly, it's possibly that people who test positive close to where they live, may go on to die in a hospital in a different area. You are likely to see a higher death to test ratio in areas with large hospitals when compared with areas with fewer or smaller hospitals. (Westminster is a good example of this)

Secondly, the mapping from NHS Trusts to UTLAs is a tricky one. Some NHS Trusts cover multiple areas, some areas may be served by multiple NHS Trusts. Additionally some NHS Trusts are responsible for hospitals all over the country. In order to make a reasonable estimate as to the number of deaths in each area, we have applied a weighted distributon algorithm based on the confirmed cases in an area to our mapping. When the distribution for a particular day is applied, our software will take into account the ratio of confirmed cases in each area served by an NHS Trust - deciding to distribute more deaths to areas with a higher number of cases and fewer deaths to areas with fewer cases. Please contact us if you find an area that you believe is not being weighted fairly and we will take a look at the NHS trusts assigned to it.

As with case data, delay in the reporting of deaths means that death data for the last few days (and in some cases further back) is constantly being revised. As such, a significant drop may appear in the number of deaths over the last few days - that doesn't necessarily mean the epidemic is tailing off.