While it is clear that cases are already increasing in the UK, it is inevitable that mass testing, particularly examining the increase in hotspot areas, will detect more cases, skewing our position in the European rankings.

While mass testing is vital to controlling the outbreak and enabling testing and monitoring to suppress the virus, it also means that the UK will be punished abroad if it does the right thing.

The UK is currently running an average of around 1 million tests a day. We find around 10,000 cases of this per day, once the false positives have been removed and the average number of cases is seven days. By contrast, Germany recorded only 1,136 cases on June 23, but analyzed ten times fewer.

We might expect that the percentage of people who test positive for the virus on any given day will not change with more or fewer tests. This means that if we reduce our own tests to the German level, we will see around 1000 cases per day.

Likewise, France recorded 2,320 cases on Tuesday but conducted nearly four times fewer tests. Assuming the case rate stays the same with more testing, an increase would not put the country far behind the UK figures.

Approximately 4,341 cases were discovered in Spain on the same day, but the country accepts 30,000 cases per day when running at the UK testing level.