LONDON (Reuters). Approximately 10% of England’s COVID-19 infections have been reported as suspected reinfections, according to a Reuters analysis. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), has recently changed the way it calculates coronavirus data.

Britain started to incorporate possible COVID-19 reinfections into daily data Monday, after a rise in cases of the Omicron-type variant of the disease.

“Reinfection was at extremely low levels up until the Omicron wave. It is right that our daily reporting processes reflect how the virus has changed,” said Steven Riley, UKHSA’s Director General of Data and Analytics.

His overall numbers continue to fall, he said.

Before Dec. 6, nearly 2% of all daily England cases were thought to have been reinfections.

According to Reuters, the rate was 9.9% by 2022 according to data from UKHSA.

A spokesperson from the National Institute of Health in Italy stated that current re-infection rates are at about 3% of all infection cases, an increase of 1.5% since Omicron.

Monday’s data shift, in which positive COVID testing were treated for separate illnesses separated by at minimum 90 days, was extrapolated back from the outbreak.

According to the UKHSA, there have been at least 588,000 cases of possible reinfections reported to date in England. This brings the total to 17.3 millions.

On June 19, 2020, the first case of suspected reinfection was reported in England.

It used to be that only people with positive test results for COVID in Britain would have been included in the daily statistics.

Monday’s data on daily cases revealed that there were 92 368 new infections, and 51 deaths. Britain had a total of 155,754 deaths from COVIDs, which is the seventh-highest global number.