Originally Posted by
Mascot PPL
dr_tbd
Great post, couldn't agree more.
Don't know if you've seen it already but a data science prof at UCL in london has been publishing some good data on progression rates in various countries to show what could be coming in the near future for those just starting to see in country transmissions e.g. UK is about 14 days behind Italy. He's not a epidemic expert but the data appears robust and the analysis seems logical to me.
Worth checking it out - COVID 19 Growth Rate
Interesting graphs. He answers some of the questions below, but does not really do a good job on the huge difference in the availability of testing and how testing is employed. It would be interesting to get the confirmed cases vs. confirmed covid-19 deaths taken into account, as there seems to be a huge difference. Now, deaths of course do lag cases, but the huge difference points towards insufficient testing in many regions.
For example testing is widely available in germany for example, in some regions including drive-in-testing for everybody who wants to get tested. Which explains, to a point the, number of cases which might be much closer to the real number of total cases than in countries where testing is limited or not available at large scale. This afternoon the number of confirmed cases stands at 5072 with 10 confirmed covid-19 deaths in germany, whereas the latest number for the UK (which is from yesterday morning) stands at 1140 cases and 21 deaths. There is clearly a huge divide there in the ratio between deaths and cases. Of course, if you want to spread misinformation you could now say that you are much more likely to get covid-19 in germany, but are much more likely to die from it in the UK. Both is simply not true at all, as both health systems work very differently and react very differently to the crisis, both in testing, public and political reaction and of course publicly available information.