The government has quietly removed 1.3m coronavirus tests from its data because of double counting, raising fresh questions about the accuracy of the testing figures.
In the government’s daily coronavirus update on Wednesday, it announced it had
lowered the figure for “tests made available” by about 10% and discontinued the metric.
An update on the page read: “An adjustment of -1,308,071 has been made to the historic data for the ‘tests made available’ metric. The adjustments have been made as a result of more accurate data collection and reporting processes recently being adopted within pillar 2.”
The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the changes affected data reported between 14 May and 12 August. It said there had been
“a double-counting of test kits that had been dispatched”, “which had not been removed from the lab’s processed data”.