I assume somebody is still doing random field testing to keep a picture of the number of people infected but we never see that figure, or so it seems.
Knowing just what is going on has been a problem, more or less, since the start. A lot of people by all accounts have been turning off the app, the ping sensitivity has been changed, the self-administered lateral flow test positives are self-reported (or not), and the test itself tends to return a lot of false negatives in a positive population. An unknown number of milder infections in younger people or in double jabbed older ones go unreported or even unnoticed.
The acid test will be what happens to hospital admissions. They haven't really dropped yet in line with cases, although the last couple of daily reports seem to be down from one story I saw.
I'm as sure as I can be that the boss and I have had it but we have not had a positive test or any diagnosis/treatment. Months afterwards, I described the exhausting coughs we had had between late January and mid-to-late March last year to my heart consultant who said he was sure we'd had covid - at a time when there was very little reported 'in the wild' - i.e. almost no testing. I looked at my diary for January 2020 and sure enough I had been to London twice, using public transport.
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