Where are we REALLY along those curves? (Part 1)

Some background if you want to understand more detail behind some of the numbers you’re seeing:

One challenge with understanding the pandemic data coming out of different areas of the world is that the information we’re getting from different areas may be quite different. When you see that a certain percentage of tests is positive in an area, for example, that percentage depends ENTIRELY on how many tests were done to begin with. Testing strategies and availability can be very different in different states or countries. The amount of data being released also varies by country. With testing availability being limited, a sign of a successful testing strategy may be a high percentage of positives, because resources are being targeted towards the highest risk patients.

The hospitalization rate in an area may give a better sense of the impact in that region, although the decision on who needs to be hospitalized can actually vary quite a bit – in putting together an entry for this contest last year my husband and I found that nearly all the factors that predicted hospital utilization had to do with the mix of specialties of doctors in the area, rather than age or health of the population.

The case fatality rate -- the number of people who die of people who get the disease -- is also affected by how many people are tested and clearly also by local factors like the age distribution of the population and how overwhelmed the health system gets. The actual case fatality rate is also difficult to know in real time because deaths one day reflect infections from weeks before – the people who were infected more recently are typically not yet ill enough to know how they’ll do.

In the next few posts I’ll go through the current data on some different areas of the world to try to understand where they are along their epidemic curve.