Up to now the government here has been giving out lateral flow test kits like sweeties. Something has changed: we are suddenly being urged to test ourselves several times a week and every time we go out to do a bit of social mixing. The upshot of this advice is we can't get our hands on test kits now, temporarily I hope, for love nor money. I'm concluding from that that millions of people have grabbed the kits and are now testing themselves, unlike before when people just like me got themselves a couple of boxes of kits and hardly ever used them (the evidence for that is that up to two or three months ago the government were getting the "mandatory" reporting-back of tests from just one kit in ten that had been given out).

So more kits, more testing, quite likely more reporting-back...and an apparent surge in positives. Anyone see why I inserted "apparent" in that sentence? I think we should hold back on the panic stations until we see over the next few weeks whether there's a concomitant rise in hospitalisations and deaths...

Obviously, all that's from a UK perspective.