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
Marta asked whether I would be writing on the weekend. The answer (as you can see) is yes, but I’ve decided to give myself the weekend off from analysis. So only three sections today. Today’s links If you’re riding bike around, you should leave more than 2 metres between youContinue Reading
Today’s insight NSW Health has released a whole lot of new information on its website about all the cases in New South Wales. There is far more information than last time I looked. The sobering statistic is that there are now 19 people in intensive care in NSW with Covid19,Continue Reading
Today’s Insight I’m working with a group of actuaries to put some numbers around possible scenarios for deaths in Australia. There are a lot of people cavalierly talking about this being an “old person’s disease”. But the information available so far (based on what has happened in China and Italy)Continue Reading
Today’s Insight/Link Today’s link and insight (I’m combining the two in one today) is a new study from Sydney University about social distancing. It uses an existing model that was built to model pandemic influenza, and concludes that 80% of the population needs to practice strict social distancing for fourContinue Reading
Today’s Insight In my first Covid reflections, I mentioned the difference in timing between infection, being infectious, having symptoms, testing positive, and recovery, or serious illness and/or death. I said that a positive test captures an event (the infection with Covid19) that happened between 4 days and 2 weeks beforeContinue Reading
Today’s Insight Several people have asked me about how we should compare ourselves to Italy. There are quite a few ways, and I’m going to go through them. Yesterday (22 March) the number of confirmed cases in Australia was 1,363. In Italy, the point where that number was reached wasContinue Reading
Today’s Insight Something that I find somewhat cheering in all the news is that here in Australia, we seem to be doing quite well on testing. The graph below, from our world in data (currently my favourite overall source) shows that we are high on the list of total testsContinue Reading
Six weeks ago, I posted about the Coronavirus in China. Reading that blogpost now seems like reading something I wrote years ago. Since then, I’ve been reading obsessively and contributed a bit in the background to some of the Actuaries Institute material, and we now have more than 1,000 cases in Australia (there were 15 when I wrote the original blog post). This post is the start of my series of posts on the Coronavirus from an actuarial perspective.Continue Reading