Dear Ed
Publication of the first COVID-19 statistics weekly report by Public Health Scotland
Further to my letter of 23 April 2020, I wanted to update you on progress with our new weekly report on COVID-19 statistics in Scotland. The first report was released on 6 May 2020. This is a week later than originally intended to allow the team to undertake further quality assurance on the data presented and to ensure, where appropriate, that we maintained consistency with the figures published each day by Scottish Government.
The new report, accompanying dashboard and open data can be accessed via the Public Health Scotland website at:
The content of the report and dashboard will be enhanced over the coming weeks with a range of additional statistics, some of which will be published weekly; others will be published as one-off “spotlights”. We will outline our plans for this in advance so that users can understand our forward timetable.
In order to present a coherent picture on COVID-19 statistics in Scotland, we have aligned the timing of our weekly report with the weekly report on deaths which is published by National Records for Scotland (NRS). I originally thought the NRS report was published at 2pm but that was a misunderstanding on my part – their report is published at 12 noon each Wednesday and I made the decision on Tuesday (5 May) to align the timing of the Public Health Scotland report, in the spirit of ensuring that both are published at the same time – we pre-announced this timing change on our website and notified key users of the change.
The Public Health Scotland report contains a link to the NRS website so that users can quickly access the weekly deaths report, and to the Scottish Government website so that users can access the daily data.
I’d be very happy to speak with you, or one of your team, about our new report. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Best wishes,
Scott Heald
Head of Profession for Statistics