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Post by cjm on Jul 19, 2020 16:57:26 GMT
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Post by Trog on Jul 20, 2020 9:43:29 GMT
I have very little faith in that particular graph.
One crucial thing that became apparent during this pandemic is that the World has absolutely no tools available to accurately measure pandemics. And with tools I mean things such as protocols, specifications, procedures, definitions and so forth. Because nobody speaks the same language - statistics published by Germany does not mean the same thing, and cannot be directly compared with statistics published by the UK, by Italy, by France, by the US, and so forth.
I'd say that one of the crucial roles of the WHO is to develop those tools and to oversee adequate training, understanding and implementation of those worldwide, so that the progression of future pandemics can be more accurately monitored.
To get back to that graph: Comparing South Africa's stats to those of other countries makes absolutely no sense. If you make some straight conversions between the UK, Germany and South Africa of number of tests per population, number of positives per number of tests, number of deaths per number of positives and so forth, then one would estimate that South Africa is under-reporting the number of positives by a factor of 5 to 7 times. Likewise, the number of Covid related fatalities is under-reported by a factor of about 10.
I cannot for a moment believe that this is simply due to South Africans being particularly robust with regards to the corona virus, or that South Africa's capacity for medical treatment is 10x greater than that of Germany's - there must be large systemic differences between how these statistics are collected and reported between South Africa, the UK and Germany.
BUT:
I've been tracking the number of daily new positives as a percentage of daily tests conducted in South Africa since the first of April, and there has been an undeniable change in the character of the trend. It followed pretty much a perfect and predictable exponential increase over the entire time period, from 1.69% on April 10 to 28% on July 14. But for the past 6 to 8 days, it was substantially below what would be expected - the first time that this has happened throughout the entire period:
Actual Expected
15-Jul 27.54 28.98
16-Jul 28.11 29.88
17-Jul 28.15 30.81
18-Jul 27.79 31.78
19-Jul 26.74 32.77
20-Jul 27.44 33.79
So it definitely looks like South Africa has reached the inflection point of diminishing daily infections.
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Post by Trog on Jul 20, 2020 14:48:34 GMT
 I personally prefer this graph. What it tracks is the R t value - that is, the number of people who an infected person will transmit the virus to. An Rt value of below 1 indicates herd-immunity and implies that the disease will soon disappear. An Rt of exactly one means that the number of new infections every day will remain constant. This graph, too, seems to suggest that new infections have leveled off. Anything above 1 corresponds to an exponential increase in daily new infections. One of the other major features of the graph for me is that it looks as if the various levels of lock-down had absolutely no influence on it - whatever is driving it down is people's own efforts at protecting themselves. |
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