Thursday, March 26, 2020

COVID-19 # 35 (Required Parts are Highlighted)

If the data from China is to be believed, the outbreak in the U.S. is now worse. Current estimates are that China's population is about 4.4 times that of the U.S. But China claims to have only had 1.3 times as many cases, and 3.6 times as many deaths.

About that data fibbing from China. Pay close attention to the number of recoveries vs. deaths. Do note that in the graph below, taken from Wikipedia, there is a glitch in the view, skipping 9 days, that causes the big jump in the middle.
On the other hand, Italy's data looks like this:
Roughly the same number of cases and deaths, but Italy isn't showing very many to have recovered. I don't think China is fibbing about recoveries: I think they were triaging, and pushing more healthy people out of hospitals and counting them as recovered (which most of them probably did). But I absolutely think it shows a health system at full capacity during a still ongoing epidemic ... and the red bars don't show that at all. Now, it's not entirely fair to point fingers at China. But, having said that, the pattern we see in Italy is common in many countries now, while the pattern in China is present in no others.

New York City is in trouble. The current forecast is for all 1,800 ICU beds in the city to be full by Friday. There are currently almost 4K people in the hospitals there for SARS-CoV-2. I believe this article entitled "13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N.Y.C. Hospital" is freely available from the New York Times.

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