3 ms·
There's a few problems you'll need to overcome. 1) We don't know what the fatality rate is yet. If you have a super-accurate count of deaths to covid-19 you ca
by DanBC 7y ago
There's a few problems you'll need to overcome.
1) We don't know what the fatality rate is yet. If you have a super-accurate count of deaths to covid-19 you can't work out the true infection rate because estimates of lethality range from about 0.% to 3%.
2) You can't get a super accurate count of deaths, and certainly not a real time count. Looking at the UK we have "deaths of people who tested positive for Covid-19 who died in hospital". We're not testing people, even if they're in hospital. There's a presumption that if you have certain symptoms then you have covid-19. So there's a bunch of people being treated for covid-19, who die from covid-19, but who were not tested as having covid-19. Their deaths won't be in these daily figures. And then we have deaths outside hospital: covid-19 is currently ripping through care homes. Maybe 50%[1] of covid deaths are happening in care homes, but if they're not counted in the daily stats you're missing all of them. The UK does have a more accurate figure from the Office For National Statistics, but there's quite a lot of lag in those figures. Someone dies, a doctor certifies the death, that's registered, and then sent to ONS for coding.
3) Everywhere is counting deaths and cases differently. I've talked about the UK and that's just 4 (or 1) countries.
Here's the UK daily covid dashboard: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c90da5b4e9f9a0b19484dd4bb14 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c9...
Here's the Office For National Statistics page talking about the different ways of counting death: https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving-the-coronavirus-covid-19/ https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving...
Here's the NHS England_Improvement Covid-19 stats page, with excel files: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
For worldwide there's the John Hopkins dashboard: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854047
- aliakhtar 7y agoYou're 100% correct. It won't be fool proof, by any means. But, it'll be better than the current situation, which is to have only the confirmed cases and no estimate of actual cases. I'm thinking of making the best guess on the fatality rate, time to double, etc, and allowing people to tweak the variables. And using the officially reported death numbers.