HPR volume 14 issue 8 (28 and 29 April)

Updated 23 December 2020

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Weekly COVID-19 surveillance report

Public Health England (PHE) now publishes a detailed weekly National Coronavirus Disease 2019 Surveillance Report to complement the daily headline UK figures on cases and mortality that have been published since January 2020.

The new report summarises and consolidates outputs from the various PHE COVID-19 surveillance systems. These systems cover the epidemiology of the epidemic in England in community, primary and secondary care settings, data on laboratory-confirmed new cases incidence, syndromic surveillance and population mortality data trends. It also includes information such as relevant Google searches.

The report is published on Thursdays at 9:30am. It includes an epidemic curve, as at 9:30am on Wednesday of each publication week. It also includes infographics and gives more detailed trend information, across a wider range of parameters than the COVID-19: tracker.

The epidemic curve for the week-ending Wednesday 22 April (week 17/2020) is shown below.

Chart showing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases (England) as at 22 April 2020. — Laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases (England) as at 22 April 2020.

A full explanation of the surveillance outputs covered by the weekly report is given in the latest edition of PHE Health Matters blog ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19): using data to track the virus’.

The blog post explains that the confirmed cases referred to in the epidemic curve are recorded according to the date specimens are received by testing laboratories rather than the date that lab results are sent to PHE. This provides for the most accurate analysis of cases over time but means that the latest days’ case numbers shown are incomplete.

It is also stressed that, because most testing to date has been offered to those in hospital with a medical need, as well as to NHS key workers, rather than to the general population, the epidemic curve currently represents the progression of severe disease incidence only, rather than the totality of all infections.