UK Covid-19 pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date

"During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, it took up to three weeks for confirmed cases to be recorded on the health database used at the time. The two-volume report into the second set of UK Covid-19 Inquiry hearings found that data collection for the systematic NHS surveillance of the virus became available around March 8, 2020. Despite every positive case being indicative of the underlying epidemic, John Edmunds, professor of infectious disease modeling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told the inquiry that the data was "very difficult to analyze.""

""There were delays of five to seven days between onset of cases and 'confirmation and entry onto the database' - although 'some cases were taking up to three weeks to be recorded.' There were significant caveats to, and uncertainties in, the data available," the report said. Edmunds told the inquiry: "New cases registered on a given day were actually reflecting infections that might have occurred two weeks earlier... We were estimating that there were hundreds or perhaps thousands of cases occurring every day." In more than 750 pages, the second module of the inquiry report - there will be ten in total - details numerous failures in the government's response to the global pandemic."

Data collection for systematic NHS surveillance became available around March 8, 2020. Confirmed Covid-19 cases could take up to three weeks to be recorded on the health database, with typical delays of five to seven days between onset and confirmation/entry. The available case data contained significant caveats, uncertainties and were difficult to analyze. New case registrations often reflected infections that occurred up to two weeks earlier, implying hundreds or thousands of daily infections. Hospital bed availability was recorded weekly rather than in real time, and existing hospital records and systems could not automatically provide live patient case-mix and capacity information before mid-March 2020.

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