Content from this website is STRICTLY ONLY for educational and research purposes and may contain errors. The model and data are inaccurate to the complex, evolving, and heterogeneous realities of different countries. Predictions are uncertain by nature. Readers must take any predictions with caution. Overly optimism based on some predicted end dates is dangerous because it may loosen our disciplines and controls and cause the turnaround of the virus and infection, and must be avoided.
Now, on the site it’s stated that the prediction is a regression analysis of the data using the SIR model. This means that they took the best-fitting parameters such that the curve of the SIR model would fit the data as close as possible.
However, the SIR model (in its bare bones form, which is used according to the motivating paper accompanying the graphs) does not incorporate very significant changes to human behaviour, such as lockdowns. It assumes a constant “infectiousness” of the virus, and that the rate of infection is only dependent on the number of infected people and the number of susceptible people, and not on changes people make to their lives to bring down this number artificially (thus, by avoiding contamination, high traffic areas, long distance travel, etc.)
So all in all, it’s a bit of a toy model, and doesn’t really tell us anything.
Australia has strange statistics. Wave almost over - most are in “recovered” category.
But out of 6,731 confirmed cases only 84 died.
No other country (that don’t has significantly less cases) has so little number of deaths.
I wonder if it has to do with age group impacted? Like NZ we locked down quickly - possibly older or more vulnerable people were more protected as a result? Just guessing.
Australia has a Case Fatality Rate (CFR) around 1.25%. Since they prevented a much larger catastrophe, they avoided the increased death rates from overwhelmed hospitals and they did a better job of testing enough people to measure a CFR much closer to the underlying Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
The actual underlying IFR is difficult to determine in the middle of an ongoing crisis, but estimates range from 0.1% to 1%.
Other countries have a much higher CFR (Belgium is around 15% and other badly affected European countries are over 10%) because there are simply too many infections for them all to be tested. While infections can grow exponentially, it is impractical to exponentially ramp up testing. In these places, there have simply not been enough tests (for weeks/months now) to keep up.
There are demographic differences, other population risk factors, and perhaps most importantly whether or not the healthcare system is overwhelmed that will also impact the IFR across different countries, but inadequate testing is perhaps the dominant factor for why the CFR appears so high right now in the worst affected countries.
Even though we only have rough estimates of the underlying IFR, and numbers like 0.1% to 1% are foolishly perceived as “small” to some, the scale of this humanitarian disaster cannot be dismissed.
These charts are copyright by FT and shared here for commentary and educational purposes, which is permissible under the fair use provisions of copyright law.
Moreover, the SIR model assumes that you know all the cases in the population on a daily bases. Due to the fact that its equations are strictly correlated. If you don’t know the exact number of infected people (because you cannot test all the earth’s population every day) the results it predicts are essentially wrong.
It would be nice if at the end of June all this will be finished. Unfortunately I think we should live with it for a long period.
Summarizing and comparing statistics like that between North American and the Europe is quite misleading.
The USA has a population of about 330 million, which is about 57% of North America.
The USA has over 1 million confirmed cases, which is over 95% of the confirmed cases in North America.
In the USA and much of Europe, the confirmed cases are only a small fraction of the actual number of infections, due to insufficient testing capacity.
Comparing confirmed cases between different countries/regions is confounded by wildly varying differences in testing capacity, which affects how many of the actual infections are able to be confirmed and counted by testing.
Comparing death tolls may be more meaningful, since it is easier to count deaths, however, there still may be some differences in how these are confirmed and attributed.
There have been about 155K deaths in Europe (not including Russia, although Russia has only confirmed 1K deaths at this point), while there have been 61K in the USA.
Police never wear masks, instead they always use this helm when they arrest someone infected
When you talk to someone, of course you take off mask first, even if you had full suit
They just built walls around part of a city and didn’t implement quarantine - their virus
develops much faster than ours, so perfect quarantine for 1 week would be more than enough
They give food to people near the walls, instead of implementing home delivery (shops not work)
Strange… it is missing Germany, the country with the mortality rate that is far from the average of the others. I would be curious to see the same plot for this country.
