Template Card Badge Icon template

[SteveDockar]

I wonder if anyone can help me here? 😃 I'm struggling to select/set the badge icon of my mushroom template card with a template.

I have a "number of people home" card which currently has my sensor.people_home_count in the secondary information field in an {% if/elif/else/endif %} for "nobody home", "one person home or "'n' people home" strings.

I'm trying to add the number in a badge. I can set the badge color with a similar if/else flow, but can't set the icon. I'm trying to use mdi:numeric-X icons for the number(s). The Mushroom docs say the field should support templates but I can't get it to work.

Ideally I'd like to have a single {{ "mdi:numeric-" + states('sensor.people_home_count') }} to select the appropriate icon, but that doesn't seem to work. The Dev-Tools template page suggests it is outputting the correct string for the icon but I wondered if this just won't work in the way I'd hoped. So, I switched to an if/else flow to select the icon name based on the sensor value, but that doesn't seem to work either. If I remove all the logic and just leave the mdi:numeric-0 icon (or whichever) name it pops up, statically of course, as expected. I'm not sure if I hit a bug, or I'm just doing something wrong.

Any help, gratefully received.