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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

"The top stories on Thursday: UK government data suggests around one in six people in London and one in 20 elsewhere in England have had coronavirus"

"With further statistical adjustments, they found about 17% of London adults had been infected; this compares to only 4.3% in the north-east of England."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52749186

That's the _BBC_, perhaps the most respected news organization on the planet, and unarguably an expert on all things London. They are citing information released by the UK government: 1 in 6 Londoners. Misinformation my a--.

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One of the things we have learned during this pandemic is that reputable sources are capable of publishing false information. So we can’t just take their assertions as facts. We have to ask them to explain how they arrived at them.

The claim that one in 6 Londoners have had the virus is particularly suspicious because Sweden made similar claims about infections in Stockholm based on rough estimates and they turned out to be wrong when actual studies were carried out.

The BBC has a fairly dire reputation for it's scientific reporting

It was the government figures, and it raised far more questions - London has an IFR of half that of the rest of the UK, does that mean it’s spread more widely amongst healthy people? Does the antibody year require a higher viral load (which you’d get spending a long time on the tube compared with driving to work in north east).

Need larger antibody tests and data broken down by demographic, globally, but we’ll have them by summer.

The BBC an expert in all things London? Maybe if you define away all the people in the city who aren't like BBC employees! Your view of the BBC is quite out of date. Most of the British population say now in polls they don't trust it. It's an open question for how long it'll stick around.

Thank you for the source. I only checked Google data and wasn't aware of the report.

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