Insight There are an increasing number of data points showing that the deaths being counted for Covid19 around the world are a serious undercount of the actual deaths caused by the disease. Today I’m showing two fairly dramatic ones. First, in England and Wales the total deaths in a weekContinue Reading
Insight One of the key numbers that many people use to track how well we are going on containing Covid19 is the number of confirmed cases. I obsessively watch it myself. Today (14 April) there are 6,400 confirmed cases in Australia, which is only a 0.5% increase on the dayContinue Reading
Insight Covid19’s death rates are higher at higher ages. In all the outbreaks so far, the case fatality rate for people over 80 is well over 10% (there’s a table below with more detail). Some of the commentary urging early reopening from lockdown implicitly suggests that those people will dieContinue Reading
Continuing with my New Zealand theme, here is Jacinda Adern letting the children of New Zealand know that the Easter Bunny is definitely an Essential worker. The first time I saw this concept was the Premier of Western Australia (who put out a press release), but as usual Jacinda AdernContinue Reading
Insight Today I’m looking at New Zealand. First, this Washington Post article admiringly describes what has been happening there – New Zealand isn’t just flattening the curve it’s squashing it (this article may be paywalled, it wasn’t the first time I saw it but it seems to be now) andContinue Reading
The Australian government has released modelling about the Covid19 pandemic and its possible impact on the health system (for some reason they have been quite reluctant to do so). I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so I’ll be blogging about it tomorrow. But if anyone would likeContinue Reading
Today’s Insight Today, I’m looking at the testing data – how much is positive. The graph belows the trend of what proportion of Covid19 tests in Australia is positive. The graph shows that the percentage of positive tests is slowly increasing. When this data was first reported, NSW only hadContinue Reading
Today’s link I’ve talked a lot about levels of testing on this blog. Australia continues to test for Covid19 at a higher level than many countries around the world. And the proportion of tests that are positive continues to hover around the 2% level in Australia, which is a reassuringlyContinue Reading
Today’s Link The Economist’s chart of the day is an attempt to work out how much Covid19 is in the community in various countries. Across the 11 European countries studied, official government statistics indicate that there are 319,500 confirmed cases, affecting less than 0.1% of the population. The Imperial researchersContinue Reading
Today’s insight As we’ve watched around the world, the most dramatic indication of the impact of Covid19 has been the stories coming out of intensive care units – health professionals in Wuhan, Lombardy, Madrid and now New York are making heartbreaking decisions because there just aren’t enough ICU beds forContinue Reading