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
Today’s Insight This great post on linkedin talks about the difficulty of calculating a case fatality rate for Covid19. A case fatality rate is the probability that someone will die if they are infected with Covid19. And to calculate the rate you need a numerator – a number of deaths,Continue Reading
Today’s Insight Today’s insight is just a brief one, it is about exponential growth. We spend a lot of time talking about how the growth of Covid19 is exponential. But exponential growth is not intuitive. To illustrate this to myself, I built a very simple model. I looked at theContinue Reading
Today’s insight I’ve previously written that the number of positive tests in any country is not necessarily a good measure of how prevalent Covid19 is in that country. It really depends on how much of the population is being tested, and how many of those tests are positive. I hadContinue Reading
Today’s Link In something that will gladden the heart of any actuary or statistician reading this, a number of Victorian testing centres have decided to test every 5th person who comes in, whether or not they meet the testing criteria. Why does that matter? Because it will give them aContinue Reading