This is south africa’s number of reported covid cases. There’s a huge spike on nov 23.
The south african health ministry is claiming (in the slides linked elsewhere in these comments) that they reacted incredibly fast, publicly communicating the finding of the new variant to the world within 36 hours. But the numbers reported here look exactly like you’d expect if someone had deliberately sat on the data for several days, and then released it all at once.
Also, the graph (in the post) showing the proportion of different variants needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That graph makes it look like the new variant is taking over brutally fast, much faster than the delta variant did in its day. But if the reporting of cases is this uneven, then we cannot extrapolate any short-term trend at all.
EDIT: just saw Gurkenglas’ other comment. If the data is wrong then my interpretation is irrelevant. But I’d still caution people to not jump the gun in predicting this new variant’s behavior based on very little data.
This looks more like “they entered a bunch of tests in the database all at once”, right?
Can you say more about what this picture depicts and why it’s relevant?
The number of cases per day, which might have explained an appearance of anomalous spread. Although after reading https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1463963512565387275 I’m retracting.
This is south africa’s number of reported covid cases. There’s a huge spike on nov 23.
The south african health ministry is claiming (in the slides linked elsewhere in these comments) that they reacted incredibly fast, publicly communicating the finding of the new variant to the world within 36 hours. But the numbers reported here look exactly like you’d expect if someone had deliberately sat on the data for several days, and then released it all at once.
Also, the graph (in the post) showing the proportion of different variants needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That graph makes it look like the new variant is taking over brutally fast, much faster than the delta variant did in its day. But if the reporting of cases is this uneven, then we cannot extrapolate any short-term trend at all.
EDIT: just saw Gurkenglas’ other comment. If the data is wrong then my interpretation is irrelevant. But I’d still caution people to not jump the gun in predicting this new variant’s behavior based on very little data.