The response

What is being done against the outbreak? Four indicators from the INSP bulletins, in the order of the response chain: the alerts surveillance receives and verifies, the samples the laboratory tests, the contacts the teams follow, the beds that take in patients. Every figure comes from a bulletin, and days when the bulletin does not give it stay empty.

An alert is a report — a sick person, a death, a rumour — that teams must go and check. Roughly one in five is validated as a suspected case and sampled. The number of alerts says whether people are looking; the validated share says what they find.

Positivity is the share of samples that confirm the virus. It measures how well tests are targeted, not how many people are infected: when it rises while the number of samples stalls, only the obvious patients are being sampled and others are being missed.

Every confirmed case leaves contacts to follow for twenty-one days. Their number is the size of the outbreak as the response sees it; the share seen each day is the grip it keeps on it — below the threshold, exposed people transmit undetected.

A saturated treatment centre pushes patients back into the community, where deaths occur outside care. Occupancy relates hospitalised patients — confirmed and suspected — to the beds the bulletin declares; it exceeds 100% where patients are placed outside the planned beds.

Sources: INSP situation reports, read bulletin by bulletin. The form of these figures has changed with each editorial period; a bulletin whose wording could not be read leaves an empty day rather than a guessed value. Alerts and laboratory figures are aggregated by week, Monday to Sunday, the current week appearing only once complete. No figure is recalculated in place of the source, except occupancy when the bulletin gives patients and beds without the rate.