COVID-19 # 27 (Required Parts are Highlighted)

The problem in the U.S. has been the lack of testing. This means that infections were accumulating without positives being announced. Now that testing has started to take off in New York, they reported:

Remember: We know that as more people are tested we will find more cases.

Last night we tested over 7,500 New Yorkers and found 1,769 new positive cases.

We will keep increasing testing to help #StopTheSpread. pic.twitter.com/Ai6NTzVnFZ

— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 19, 2020

That's a 23% positive rate. Positive rates have been far lower in other places, mostly because everyone who presented at a hospital respiratory problems was tested (or at least as many as they could test), and there's a lot of other causes of respiratory problems. It stands to reason that because New York now has drive through testing, that it is picking up people outside hospitals who know the symptoms, and crucially, don't have another viable cause for how they feel.

The number of deaths in Italy has passed the official number of deaths from China. China has 23 times as many people. BUT, most deaths in China were in Hubei, which is roughly the population of Italy. Whatever. It's pretty clear Italy has the worst outbreak in the world.

When you see images like this one, stop paying attention and move on to something else.

Things like this are superficially pleasing to the untrained eye. You should be starting to know better. The problem with this is that it suggests that Italy is about to peak. The thing is, there's no way to know that from this data, and it's an insult to all the people in those countries who are the moving parts that made this data happen. Cases is a result of a long chain of possibilities: number of interaction, number of initial infected, safety measures taken, how many tests were done, and so on. And, on a completely different note, this is just a comparison of 2 countries that happen to match up well. With 200 countries, there's about 20K pairs you could plot ... wonder how long it would take a an algorithm to produce and sort through those to find the one with the most apparent correlation.

Also, in keeping with this graph being a POS, check out the vertical scale. Believe me when I tell you the log scale is a tipoff that someone may have something interesting to say. (FWIW: I didn't look at the scale until I was done flaming the graph above ... so I had an "it figures" moment).

Simulations from the WorldPop group at the University of Southampton estimate that China's would have suffered 67 times as many infections if they had not undertaken the quarantine actions that they did. But, having said that, starting a week earlier would have reduced infections by 66 percent. This is important given the efforts of the government of China to portray the intervention that they did as appropriately timed.