All Covid related data published here comes from UK or Scottish government sources and much of it is processed before being charted.
This page gives links to all sources and details of the processing carried out. This will allow anyone to check the validity of what we publish.
Any errors, omissions or questions should be submitted through the contact page.
Data Sources.
All data in these charts is from UK or Scottish government sources.
Scotland:
Coronavirus (COVID-19): trends in daily data
Deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) in Scotland
Timeline of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Scotland
UK:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
What do we do with the data?
Much of the Scottish data is published as ‘cumulative totals’. This gives the current total so to get a daily or weekly figure we subtract the previous value from the current.
Averaging
The daily data is very variable. The list below is a snapshot of 7 days worth of numbers of daily tests reported. On a graph this variation would swamp any trend in the overall data. For that reason, all daily data is averaged over the 7 days (that day and the 6 previous.). In this case, the data point for the last day would be shown as the average value of 18,930.
18,777
22,784
29,644
17,229
11,479
10,499
22,096
It should be noted that this variation is absolutely to be expected for data being collected daily like this – it is not a sign of a problem.
Normalising
How do you compare the number of cases in the Western Isles NHS area with those in the Glasgow NHS area or with UK or global statistics?
I am adopting the method used elsewhere which is to quote figures per 100,000 of population.
To calculate this we divide the data by the population/100,000
The Scottish Government use the figure of 5,463,300 for the population of Scotland.
If the number of cases was 1000 we would divide that by 5,463,300 /100,00 which is 54.633
1000/54.633 = 18.3 per 100,000
The populations of each health board area as published by the Scottish Government are
| NHS Ayrshire and Arran | 369360 |
| NHS Borders | 115510 |
| NHS Dumfries and Galloway | 148860 |
| NHS Forth Valley | 306640 |
| NHS Grampian | 585700 |
| NHS Highland | 321700 |
| NHS Lothian | 907580 |
| NHS Orkney | 22270 |
| NHS Shetland | 22920 |
| NHS Western Isles | 26720 |
| NHS Fife | 373550 |
| NHS Tayside | 417470 |
| NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde | 1183120 |
| NHS Lanarkshire | 661900 |