Agreed that #2 could be a big issue. Rapid increase in confirmed cases could easily be due to rapid increase in testing rather than (such) rapid spread of the virus.
What would the graphs look like if they plotted the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 rather than the number of confirmed cases? In theory the number of deaths should mostly be a lagged & noisier reflection of the number of cases, with less dependence on testing regimes.
This is a great thought and I’ve added a graph in the appendix.
It seems to confirm that early doubling time is lower than commonly reported.
There is no lag between cases and deaths as would have been expected. Any ideas?
Later on the doubling time goes up faster for cases than for deaths. The final 4 points are from after China started including clinical diagnoses in their statistics. Here I just used the number actually tested which I thought would be fine but it’s possible that the number of tests being carried out decreased which would explain the increase in doubling time. However, even before this change there was a bit of a trend upwards so I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.
Note: On days 1 and 3 there were no additional deaths so the calculated doubling time is infinite. In reality we should just adjust the surrounding points up a bit
Agreed that #2 could be a big issue. Rapid increase in confirmed cases could easily be due to rapid increase in testing rather than (such) rapid spread of the virus.
What would the graphs look like if they plotted the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 rather than the number of confirmed cases? In theory the number of deaths should mostly be a lagged & noisier reflection of the number of cases, with less dependence on testing regimes.
This is a great thought and I’ve added a graph in the appendix.
It seems to confirm that early doubling time is lower than commonly reported.
There is no lag between cases and deaths as would have been expected. Any ideas?
Later on the doubling time goes up faster for cases than for deaths. The final 4 points are from after China started including clinical diagnoses in their statistics. Here I just used the number actually tested which I thought would be fine but it’s possible that the number of tests being carried out decreased which would explain the increase in doubling time. However, even before this change there was a bit of a trend upwards so I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.
Note: On days 1 and 3 there were no additional deaths so the calculated doubling time is infinite. In reality we should just adjust the surrounding points up a bit