The government is now actively hiding millions of tests that were "sent out" but never used.

On August 12 (after they removed 1.3 million double counted tests) there were still 4,188,503 tests missing.

But all the data that lets us calculate this has been now withdrawn!

On August 12th they officially withdrew the "made available" data, suggesting it wasn't relevant anymore.

They only ever counted tests this way to hit the 100,000 tests a day target by including thousands of tests still in the post towards the total.

https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1257078725025423360?s=19

What they didn't announce is that this would also be the last day they reported the number of pillar 2 swab tests done "in person".

Without this data we don't know how many "sent out" tests have been processed.

Tests processed - tests done in person = sent out tests processed.

The next day, August 13th, was the last time they've told us how many pillar 4 surveillance tests have been done in person.

Again, this stops us knowing how many pillar 4 tests have vanished into the system but never actually been used.

They're still reporting the number of tests "sent out" as a separate total, but not the number done "in person".

Why do this unless they're intentionally hiding the data from us to stop us spotting any future errors or lies in the number of tests they claim to be doing?

The data they removed is what we used to work out that millions of tests put in the post were never used!

These unused tests were counted in headline figures and used by the government to hit targets and defend their performance until we called them out. https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1289634004874883072?s=19

The data they removed is also what we used to figure out that the government had been double counting some tests as both sent out and done in person.

3 weeks before they finally admitted this and corrected their numbers! https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1288222376589754368?s=19

Without access to the data on in person tests (and other data that's already been withdrawn, such as the number of people tested each day) it's harder to know what's going on inside the testing programme, and to spot when errors happen or the government is blatantly lying to us.

It's perhaps no coincidence that this purging of awkward data comes as the government promises mass, population wide testing to allow further easing of restrictions.

When the next scandal or cock up hits, we might not be able to spot it now. https://twitter.com/standardnews/status/1296055816949293056?s=19