The goddam plane has crashed into the mountain (again)

At last it seems the BBC is owning up to the fact that the government is not in control of the infection rate anymore...

...the official R rate is now 1.2 ...if that graph is showing a 1.2 replication rate then my knowledge of integer fuctions isn't what it used to be.  

So far the government has been able to pretend that although the graph is shooting through the roof this is the result of a lot of increased testing...

...however the cat was let out of the bag a few days ago that something more is going on when the admissions to hospitals started to rise again.

These run about a week or two behind the infection rate statistics so there'll doubtless be a further rise in those very soon...

... the rise has of course not yet filtered through to the death statistics but that's not surprising given that the death statistics run about three to four weeks behind the hospital admissions.

On top of this there's the problem that the government has also started to run out of testing capacity (again) so the situation that the blue graph is trying to show us is actually much worse than it shows as many people showing symptoms can't get a test.

Very very soon the death statistics are going to start creeping up again.  The questions are : how high will it go...

...and also more fundamentally the purpose of testing outside hospital settings is to control the spread of the virus.  If it's demonstrably failing to slow the spread then is all this mass testing actually a sensible use of money?

At last a version of the much vaunted track and trace app may be available soon but ...

...again unless the test system is working properly the track and trace app is fairly impotent as it wont have a useful dataset to work from.  So...