3 ms·

This is just a general comment about all of these (really quite nice) data visualizations: they're based on confirmed cases. Given the many issues with the lim

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The general response to this would be that the amount of testing can shift the prognosis by couple of days. Is New York 14 days behind Italy, or 10 days, or 20 days? Doesn't matter if no action is taken, and the best results will be achieved by taking action immediately.
• atoav 7y ago
  Also this is very different per nation. E.g. Germany has labs in most university clinics and a tight network of private commercial labs, which are nearly all able to test for COVID-19, while the situation in Italy regarding tests was much much worse, so they didn't see it comming at all. So how can one really compare the numbers between nations when their testing capabilitied are so different? The ground truth is certainly deaths - if you know the mortality rate if the virus you can infer from the number of deaths how many people had been infected at some point in the past. Of course it would be much better to have an idea how many people are infected now, so you can base your decisions on it.. The dangerous thing about viruses is that they grow in a logistic curve and the first part of that curve is exponential. So things can grow out of proportion literally overnight, like they did in Italy.