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FACT CHECK
Viral tweet overstates UK’s lead in Covid-19 cases
A tweet shared several thousand times claimed that, on Sunday 17 October, “1 in 5 of the new [Covid] cases in the whole world were on our little island.” But due to time differences, this was based on incomplete data.
The Twitter user made their comment at 8pm Greenwich Mean Time, meaning it was still the morning in parts of the Western Hemisphere, for example, 10am in Hawaii. So it’s unlikely all of the day before’s statistics would be collated yet in this part of the world, especially following the weekend.
Full data for 17 October suggests the UK was responsible for almost 15% of the world’s cases. But that figure needs a bit of context too.
Because 17 October was a Sunday, some countries such as Spain and Belgium didn’t report figures at all. There may also be weekend delays in reporting numbers of cases. For example, the next day, on 18 October, the US reported over 116,000 new cases, compared to just 17,620 the day before.
On 18 October, the day after the figures reported in the tweet, the UK reported around 11% of the world’s new cases.
This is why it’s often more useful to look at new Covid cases as a rolling seven day average, to avoid the artificial drop seen at weekends.
If we look at the rolling seven day average of new Covid cases on 17 October, the UK had 10% of new cases, far fewer than the 20% claimed in the tweet. In comparison, the US had 21%.
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FACT CHECK
The Joe Rogan podcast misused English Covid-19 data
The Joe Rogan Experience is one of the most listened to podcasts in the world, with an estimated 11 million people listening to each episode. On this podcast, a guest used data from Public Health England to claim that people over 40 are more likely to catch Covid-19 if they are vaccinated. This is not true.
There are essentially two reasons why this data cannot be used to compare outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
We don’t know how many unvaccinated people there are
For this, we would need to know the actual populations of each age group in England, and then subtract the vaccinated people from them. And with vaccination rates often around 90% or higher in older age groups, the population numbers have to be very accurate, or they can skew the infection rates substantially.
In its surveillance reports, PHE used population estimates from the National Immunisation Management System, which are higher for the older age groups than population estimates from the Office for National Statistics. This may make Covid case rates look much lower among unvaccinated people than they really are.
The behaviour of vaccinated and unvaccinated people may be different
For instance, vaccinated people might feel they are less likely to catch Covid, and therefore take more risks of being exposed to it. If so, this could make vaccinated people more “likely” to catch Covid, even though the vaccine itself is substantially protecting them.
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MORE FACT CHECKS
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