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Seeking Truth in Scottish Politics

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About the Data

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 Arran369360
NHS Borders115510
NHS Dumfries and Galloway148860
NHS Forth Valley306640
NHS Grampian585700
NHS Highland321700
NHS Lothian907580
NHS Orkney22270
NHS Shetland22920
NHS Western Isles26720
NHS Fife373550
NHS Tayside417470
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde1183120
NHS Lanarkshire661900

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