Science suggests West Yorkshire ‘lockdown’ is not necessary – Tom Lees

But how confident can we be that there actually is – or was – a spike? After all, any measure taken in response can have negative consequences for people and businesses.

Every week Public Health England publishes a Covid-19 surveillance report which includes opaquely estimated infection rates per 100,000 of population.

Some of the areas covered by additional restrictions include Bradford (53.2 cases per 100,000), Calderdale (43.3 cases per 100,0000) and Kirklees (27.8 cases per 100,000).

Anyone relying on these figures may worry or be concerned that action needs to be taken. However, anyone who has worked with statistics knows that one metric often doesn’t show the whole picture. How that metric was calculated actually matters.

The Public Health England data is masquerading as being a more accurate measure of Covid-19 prevalence than it really is. As Ed Humpherson, of the UK Statistics Authority, told the New York Times: “Being trustworthy depends not on conveying an aura of infallibility, but on honesty and transparency.”

In areas across the North, the number of tests carried out each day have gone up. At the start of August, Calderdale, Bradford and Kirklees conducted nearly twice as many tests as they had done in the weeks before.

The result? As more people were tested more cases have been found, although the majority involved individuals with no symptoms or people under the age of 50 and at minimal to no risk.

If you actually want to know whether rates of Covid-19 are going up or down, you need to take a large sample of people from the community at random, as is done by the Office for National Statistics each week.

They say that in fact “there is no clear evidence to say with confidence that infection rates differ by region”.

Another challenge is that when case numbers are so low which they are now, but testing volumes are high, the accuracy of the test being used plays an increasingly important role.

The most common test for Covid-19 being used is 100 per cent accurate in terms of both sensitivity (the ability of the test to detect people who have a virus), and is between 99 and 100 per cent accurate in terms of specificity (the ability of the test to correctly identify that a person does not have a virus).

Around 39,000 such tests are being carried out across the North daily. Given specificity may be 99 per cent, testing could be falsely generating 390 people with Covid a day who, in fact, are not actually infected.

And when we look at other indicators of the pandemic, they, in fact, show no change or a continued petering out
of the virus. The average number of patients admitted to hospital a day in Yorkshire and the North East has fallen to just 8.6 out of a population of 8.2 million people.

For the past few days, Yorkshire has also recorded zero deaths from or with Covid-19. In fact, for England and Wales, there have been more deaths from the flu and pneumonia for the past five weeks than Covid-19.

Calls to 111 or 999 across the North are also flat and show a significant fall since their peak.

The Government Office for Science estimates the ‘R’ rate per region and whether they think cases are growing or declining. For Yorkshire and the North East, its latest data suggests that cases are shrinking by as much as four per cent a day.

Given the caution which the Public Health England data needs to be treated with, and the other indicators showing no upward trend, the local restrictions seem unnecessary.

Unfortunately many politicians – both national and local – have little to no ability or background in maths or science, leading to misunderstandings and misinterpretation of data and insufficient questioning of the broader picture in which we find ourselves.

Every piece of unfounded alarm or hysteria damages confidence, business and people’s mental health. As people start to return back to normal, and spend in our desperately struggling small shops and restaurants, the Government and many Northern leaders must stop inflicting unnecessary further damage on the communities concerned.

Tom Lees is a theoretical physicist, policy expert 
and managing director of consultancy firm Bradshaw Advisory.

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