Statistics (Page 3)

On:
In: Covid19, Statistics

How does Australia’s 2021 Covid19 wave compare to 2020? So far, cases are around three times higher and deaths are around a third of last year.

Today’s analysis is a quick graph. I’ve seen this graph from lots of other countries, but now here in Australia our latest wave is big enough to categorically show that vaccination has made a difference compared with the Victorian wave last year. As you can see, in 2020, deaths lagged cases by around 2-3 weeks. This year, the death rates compared with numbers of cases is substantially lower, and the rate also looks as if it is slightly improving.Continue Reading

On:
In: Covid19, Health care, Statistics, Work and life

In NSW in this wave of Covid19, are hospitals starting to ration care and send more sick people home as they run out of space? The statistics suggest that hospital in the home is being used more and more to take the pressure off hospitals. But some of the reduction in hospitalised cases could also be vaccination starting to reduce the seriousness of Covid19 illnesses.Continue Reading

On:
In: Covid19, Statistics, Work and life

The Covid19 outbreak in NSW continues to grow despite a gradually tightening lockdown. The current doubling time is about 11 days, meaning that my simple model is projecting 1,000 cases a day by the end of August. It seems the only way out is vaccination. How much vaccination? The DohertyContinue Reading

On:
In: Climate Change, Statistics

Today the IPCC released its sixth assessment report, and I’ve had a look at what it says about extremes – weather and climate. In this land of drought and flooding rain, extreme weather is already damaging, and the IPCC report makes it clear that it is going to get worse – the extremes get more extreme faster than the medians move. Continue Reading

On:
In: Covid19, Demography, Statistics

What factors seem to lead to higher or lower vaccination rates in NSW? I’ve adjusted the NSW location vaccination rates for the age mix of each location. The strongest correlation is with income levels – the higher the income, the more likely the population is to have had at least one dose of vaccine. Surprisingly, the percentage of the population who speaks a language other than English doesn’t seem to make much difference. Continue Reading

On:
In: Covid19, Statistics

With the delta variant widespread, Australia needs to aim for around 80% vaccination of the whole population before widespread opening of international borders to avoid lockdowns and unacceptably high deaths from Covid19, based on my use of The University of Melbourne’s Covid19 modelling. We could open up in a limited way at earlier levels (at least 50% of the population vaccinated), but to avoid frequent lockdowns, we would have to limit international arrivals until vaccination is close to population wide. And even when opening up happens, many of the non pharmaceutical measures (like masks, contact tracing, regular testing etc) we have grown used to since Covid19 came to Australia will still be with us.Continue Reading

On:
In: Covid19, Risk management, Statistics

Australia has had very little Covid19 compared with the rest of the world, due to very strict border controls and lockdowns. But with the rest of the world opening up as their populations are increasingly vaccinated, how does Australia do the same? I look at some initial modelling from the Burnet Institute.  My key takeaways? The better the vaccine efficacy (particularly against any form of infection and transmission) the more we can open up without serious Covid19 disease. And waiting until a reasonable proportion of the population is vaccinated (say 40%) makes a real difference to the incidence of severe disease and death.Continue Reading

On:
In: Covid19, Statistics

I wanted to do some interesting analysis of who is getting vaccinated in Australia, in the different categories, now that more than 4 million doses have been delivered. But I can’t. Why not? Because unlike every other rich country I have randomly googled, very little data is publicly available. So instead, I’ve looked at what data other countries have been tracking, and why it would help our rollout.Continue Reading