3 ms·
Nah, it's a statistical artefact caused by testing policies. In March, you needed multiple symptoms to get a test, which meant that conditional on having a tes
by disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Nah, it's a statistical artefact caused by testing policies.
In March, you needed multiple symptoms to get a test, which meant that conditional on having a test, your illness was much more serious.
Because this isn't an issue right now, it looks like the mortality rates have dropped when it's more likely that we are capturing a larger proportion of mild cases.
- beagle3 6y agoObviously depends on where you look for this kind of reasoning, but I don’t think it is compatible with data in general. Sweden’s death graph totally looks like “inventory of likely-to-die people exhausted”, regardless of testing (they have not changed recommendations or actions). Israel had no first wave in April (it had a blip, which turns out was essentially limited to ultra orthodox religious which are about 15% of the population). In September, the official 2nd wave but really 1st wave struck the entire population - and testing capacity was already high (about 0.7% of the population tested daily). And the stats looked way too similar to other countries’ first wave. The US is a weakly connected network of hundreds of different repositories, which makes it really hard to observe similar processes - they are not visible on aggregate.