Was the latest release from the Office of National Statistics the shocking piece of evidence that led the Prime Minister to change his mind on children going back to school, and to introduce a full lockdown in England?
The ONS does not usually publish its infection survey on Tuesdays – it usually comes out on Fridays – yet today we seem to have a special release. It shows that the sharply rising numbers of new infections as picked up through the NHS Test and Trace system, and which have shown 60,000 new infections today, are not the result of distortions caused by Christmas. The ONS survey is based on testing a random sample of the population for prevalence of the disease and from that estimating a nationwide figure.
Between 27 December and 2 January, the ONS estimates, one in fifty people in England had the virus.
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