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 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