This week's Test & Trace report is an unmitigated disaster.

Cases rising, contact tracing performance sliding, test turnaround times hit by an IT failure, a backlog of tests to process at overstretched labs, and big historic revisions due to some *really* embarrassing errors.
The number of people testing positive in the community (pillar 2) jumped by 25% from last week, despite less people being tested this week. The % of positive tests rose from 1.2% to 1.5%.

Worryingly, for the first time cases in hospitals (pillar 1) are going up again as well.
Although far more people tested positive this week, the number referred to Test & Trace DROPPED slightly.

The notes blame this on a "delay in processing", with 681 people who tested +ve not referred until the next week.

But the shortfall is 1,813!

It's normally a few hundred.
Meanwhile the national (Serco/Sitel) team's performance continues to slowly slide, with the % of cases reached falling from 79% to 77% and the % of contacts reached falling from 61% to 59%.

These are the worst figures for a month, reversing most of the improvements made in July.
They're also taking longer to reach people, continuing a steady decline in performance that's been going on for the last month.

Since peaking 4 weeks ago, the % of cases reached within 24 hours of referral to the service has dropped from 61% to 55%, and contacts from 51% to 46%.
The IT failure at one lab mentioned in last week's report continues, with turnaround times for Home and Satellite (inc Care Home) tests getting even worse.

Meanwhile the report admits labs are unable to keep up with the increasing number of tests being done, causing backlogs.
About 4% of Mobile and Regional tests and 5% of Home Tests (that were returned to a lab) weren't completed at all (ie didn't deliver a result), by far the worst figures so far.

All of which suggests the testing system is overstretched and starting to buckle.
The problem is clearer looking at the number of tests done, split by the time taken to process them.

More tests are being done each week, but the number turned around within 24 or 48 hours is actually falling, so more and more take 72+ hours to deliver a result (if at all).
And finally the embarrassing bit.

After admitting last week that they didn't know where their mobile test units were, this week they've admitted that they've been counting tests based on where the lab that processed them is, instead of where the person who was tested lives!
So if a test sample taken in England was processed at the Lighthouse Lab in Glasgow or Newport, it wasn't counted in the Test & Trace report before, because they used the address of the lab instead of the person tested to determine which nation the test took place in!

Shambolic!
They also seem to have adjusted the data to fix issues with double counting some tests as both "sent out" and "in person", which has the side effect of massively raising the number of tests sent to Satellite Sites (inc care homes) counted as processed. https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1293896853717647360
The result of correcting these two embarrassing errors is dramatic.

Satellite Site tests have almost doubled.

Home Tests in recent weeks have gone up by 50-100%.

But most of the Mobile Unit tests added last week to fix another stupid error have been taken away again!
There's also an unexplained adjustment to data for Regional Test Sites, which barely changes the number of tests processed, but conveniently shifts 2% of them into the "within 24 hours" bracket.

I can't find any note to say why this was done.

Solid = new data
Dotted = old data
But none of this affected the number of people reported tested in previous weeks, which changed by less than 1%.

So they seem to have known how many people they had tested, but not how many tests they had done on them or where they had been tested. 🤔
So all in all, this week's report is a mess.

They've got IT issues.
They've got processing issues.
They've been counting the tests wrong.
Lab capacity has been stretched to breaking point.
The number of people testing positive is going up.
And contact tracing is getting worse.
My analysis of last week's report is here, for comparison - https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1294576960560148480
You can follow @_johnbye.
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