IT's interesting how the narrative is starting to change around the rate of Covid infections.

On Saturday, the Guardian published the most recent data regarding infections in the town and reported that apart from Locking Stumps, every area had seen a welcome fall in the number of people testing positive for coronavirus.

Those figures fit in with the national outlook. Despite dire warnings that we would have 100,000 new cases a day following the ending of almost all Covid restrictions, the pandemic seems to have gone into something of a decline.

We had a peak of almost 54,000 new cases in mid-July but by the end of the month, that number had fallen by a staggering amount down to a seven-day rolling average of 28,500.

This is all the more remarkable given that the only times we have seen the virus figures fall both nationally and across Warrington have been when we have been in lockdown.

So at first glance, it looks likely that the government has got this right, opening up to protect the economy, removing social distancing and mask-wearing, while relying on the vaccination programme to keep the pandemic in check.

Or has it?

Now I have no reason to question the figures produced by Public Health England and the NHS. I am sure there is no underhand massaging of the data going on behind the scenes to fit the government’s strategy.

But, and this is a big but, something is not quite right here. As Prof Tim Spector says, there’s something ‘shady’ about those government figures. Step forward another official body, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which also tracks the course of the virus through its Coronavirus Infections Survey.

So while the government says Covid infections are going down, the ONS begs to differ.

This is what its latest report had to say: “In England, the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus continued to increase [not decrease] in the week ending July 24 2021, though there are possible signs that the rate of increase may have slowed. We estimate that 856,200 people within the community population in England had Covid-19, equating to around 1 in 65 people.”

And this is backed up by the ZOE Covid Study app, which collects data from more than four million users, with 2,000 of them in Warrington, and on Saturday estimated there were 2,124 infected people in the town.

So what’s going on and who do you believe?

I think we may have accidentally wandered into Donald Trump territory here. Remember he famously said: “Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.”

This, of course, was absolute nonsense. The cases exist whether or not they are tested, so maybe the apparent fall in the number of positive cases from the government figures is Trump in reverse – we have fewer cased simply because fewer people are being tested.

This could well be a result of children not being tested during the school summer holidays, coupled with those suffering mild symptoms declining to be tested to avoid having to self-isolate.

There is also a third possible reason. It appears the ‘classic’ Covid symptoms – a new and persistent cough, high temperature and a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste – aren’t the symptoms to look out for with the Delta variant of the virus.

It seems that many Delta-infected people are reporting a headache and other symptoms that replicate hay fever or a summer cold.

So there may be many people wandering round town with a runny nose, sneezing all over the place, who have actually got coronavirus and don’t recognise it as such.

This isn’t helped by the gov.uk ‘get a free PCR test’ website home page which says you should get a test if you have the three ‘classic symptoms’ with no mention of the Delta variant ones.

So what’s my hot take on this? Well, it does look like the vaccination programme is having a significant effect on reducing serious illness, the need for people to be admitted to hospital and the number of deaths but there’s probably a much higher number of infected people in the community than the government’s figures suggest.

So as far as I’m concerned, social distancing is still very much on my agenda.