ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Mortality lags, but you can allow for the lag in the calculations/interpretations.
Pardon my layman's ignorance, but I have much more confidence in the utility and reliability of mortality numbers.
ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth
Mortality is a lagging indicator and will actually change in the next months and years. Reported infections is probably the best number for predictive analysis
I thought Poultry Lad did a fine job of explaining why mortality numbers aren't all that reliable either. There are also other reasons why, in a case like this where at least some deaths are the result of not enough system capacity to treat those in need of intensive care, number of cases is a better thing to track. We should be looking at both, and knowing that both are imperfect.
UK expert associated with the Imperial College study now things the R0 is around 3.1, which means that over 10 generations a single person would be "responsible" for over 80,000 infections instead of just under 10,000. Link:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... -predicts/. Now, they've been the most pessimistic of the public expert sources, but they're still experts making educated guesses rather than armchair spreadsheet artists pontificating on a forum.
Just given where we're at and trends elsewhere, I don't think we'll be on the other side of the curve here in the US as a whole (which now has the highest raw total of confirmed infections as of today) until after the middle of May.
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
If we're willing to shovel $USD 2.5T onto this thing as a short-term economic Band-Aide, why not a "Manhattan Project" level of commitment to upgrading our creaky public health infrastructure? It's gotta be done.
Glad I didn't have a mouthful of liquid while I read this, or I'd have done a spit take [:D]
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
I'm intrigued by the pattern of disease domestically. NYC and surrounds are still circa 60% of our national caseload. For an area of what-give or take-14 million people? So roughly 4.2% of our population has 60% of our national cases.
It's about 20M, so ~6%.
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
We're all aware that Germany has been doing better than many other European countries, and we've discussed possible reasons here.
These graphs from Worldometers are of interest. You can see that the number of deaths in Germany is beginning to rise noticeably. On the other hand it seems that the number of new cases has plateaued. As many have noted in here, mortality lags behind the new cases, which is what we're seeing.
If these numbers are accurate it could be that Germany's death rate will soon level off (unless the number of cases hasn't actually plateaued, but we'll know more about that soon).
I wouldn't call that "plateaued" (Kull isn't the only one here who does data analysis), however it does look like it
may have inflected but is still rising (although at a slowing rate). Or it may not have as it looks like the potential inflection would've been around March 21-22 and it's just too early to tell.
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
Remember early projections, like the Oz think tank (or university) study that came up with seven scenarios, the best of which had 17 million deaths worldwide? We're still on course to deal with numbers utterly unlike that.
Some of this is in good faith. As JohnD noted above, varying numbers a bit has huge consequences when dealing with exponential equations. But the dadgum media.
This seems to be on the low end, while others are much higher. What actually happens will almost certainly be somewhere in between. And yes, the media is just as bad at reporting on numbers and this sort of thing as the public is at digesting it. Writ large, they're drawn from the same pool of humans, after all.
And yes, I have read every post since I last posted.
