Covid-19 UK government, winter 2020, Tiered restrictions data

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries took the approach of tiered restrictions. The UK Government’s Winter 2020 Plan looked to take a data driven approach to decision making. They proposed a set of factors (criteria) that would be used to determine what level of restrictions of movement (Tier) should be imposed on different geographical areas in England. Restrictions were tiered from Tier-1 to Tier-4, with Tier-1 being the most relaxed set of restrictions and Tier-4 representing the most constrained level of restrictions. The set of criteria, to determine which Tier from 1 to 4 an area should be placed in were, (1) case detection rate in all age groups, (2) case detection in people aged 60 or above, (3) how quickly case rates were rising or falling, (4) ratio of positive cases in the general population, (5) pressure on the healthcare service. England is geographically made up of 9 Regions which each contains a set of Lower Tier Local Authority (LTLA) areas. Each observation in the dataset denotes information for an LTLA and date pair. For each observation, there is data relating to the values of the set of 5 criteria, for that LTLA, on that day, along with the accompanying Tier value the LTLA was in on that day. Data relating to the set of 5 criteria represent 7-day rolling averages, as a common practice, to alleviate discrepancies in the reporting velocity at different days of the week. For example, it is the case that the number of reported cases around weekends were invariably lower than the cases on other days.