There is a lot of stuff being written about the Covid-19 pandemic and hard data threatens to get lost in the noise. Here is a dashboard that shows clearly the rates of positive tests, deaths, and recoveries using data provided by the CDC and the WHO for each country and for regions within some countries. Interestingly, this dashboard was created by Avi Schiffmann, a high school student in the state of Washington, who is clearly using his time at home to sharpen his computer skills.
There are other dashboards as well such as this one from the WHO.
I heard a warning by a reporter on On the Media who said that there are a lot of unreliable data analyses and projections being put out on the internet by people who seem to have some credentials because they know how to analyze data (economists, doctors, Silicon Valley techies, and the like) but are not really qualified in this area because they do not know the nuances. The reporter said that these ‘coronavirus influencers’ are people who crunch data for a living but are now bored at home and are turning their skills to looking at this pandemic, but in the process their well-meaning attempts to be helpful are resulting in giving out misleading information.
Avi S.’s dashboard has the same flaw as many others, in that it fails to account for the population size of entities shown. This is important because a key quantity of interest is the impact per person. In economic terms, that’s equivalent to merely considering a nation’s overall GDP, whereas a more informative measure for a country’s development level is GDP per capita. Even with this, of course, different cities and region in each country will have different GDP per capita, and likewise different COVID-19 prevalences.
For a different take, including some of its inherent drawbacks, see https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ and the associated video on the respected Minute Physics YouTube channel. The authors show a clear criterion to assess the impact of public health policies.
Several sites are reporting that Beijing’s claims are questionable. Blogs and sites like The Express (UK) barely qualify as news, but photos and reports by Time and Bloomberg are repeating the same things: thousands of urns daily at Wuhan’s seven mortuaries.
I suspect it’s just a matter of time before the dam breaks and Beijing can’t maintain the façade.
@Michael Sternberg(#1):
Seeing you talk about that flaw perhaps you can appreciate this site
There is also the John Hopkins site which is a more visual one but has the same flaw. No relation to the people living in the area just the hard numbers.
@1: Switzerland has per capita more registered cases than The Netherlands. However it should be noted that my native country tests very few people. It’s likely by now that about 5 -- 10 times as many people are infected (which would mean 55 000 to 110 000) and possibly even 20 times.
It’s also very possible that The Netherlands will run out of IC-rooms next week.
Not sure population matters at this time. What is important is getting the rate of infection down, whether the current number is 1000 or 1,000,000, or population is 20 million or 1 billion.
@mnbo(#4): They test anyone getting into the hospital with possible symptoms. about 20% of the people develop symptoms. Thus we have about 55k people infected.
And running out isn’t going to happen for another two weeks since they are scaling up available IC-beds for COVID-19 patients by another 1000 to 1500 places. That should be barely enough IF (and only IF) the number of new cases per day doesn’t increase (on an average stay of 4 weeks and 100 new IC cases/ways). The current graph that doesn’t show an increase and even a slightly lower number of cases should be taken cautiously if like seven days ago there is a weekend dip in reported cases.
Eh about 20% develop severe enough symptoms to be hospitalized not 20% of the people develop symptoms.