Sunday, November 01, 2020

Covid International

Bsking tells me the worldometers stats for states have a limitation, in that the do not account for various methods by which states compute excess deaths.  Massachusetts CoVid and excess death numbers are much closer together than most (all?) other states, so they look a bit worse in the comparison. They get dinged for being more precise. Something similar just has to be happening internationally, so each country's placement lacks full precision.

Nonetheless, they are good for relative comparison purposes. Sometimes it pays to just browse around looking at the graphs over time. For those countries that are sort of like us, the months-long trends are interesting.  America's graph has a different shape, a bit steadier over time. Europe had an initial spike, then nothing, and now are seeing a huge increase in cases, a more moderate increase in deaths. Spain has twice the number of new cases than it had at the height of March, deaths were near zero but are now climbing again. The UK has five times the number of cases it had in March, deaths are rising, but still not at March levels. Italy similar.  France has eight times the number of new cases, deaths went to zero over the summer, now climbing alarmingly. Sweden's graph is quite different, with more consistent new cases and deaths over time, but not the recent increase in deaths. Canada's numbers are more like Europe's (though lower) but with a doubling in number of cases and a recent increase in deaths, coming up from near zero.

I won't add my guesses as to the shape of the graphs and the reasons, but one fact is pretty clear at this point. Deaths per 1000 cases are way down. Our medical teams are much better at treating this and more of those infected are surviving.  Or, the virus may be weakening. Or we all may be less-infected even if we get the disease because of lowered viral load.

5 comments:

Texan99 said...

Or, sadly, we may already have infected and killed many of the most vulnerable.

RichardJohnson said...

one fact is pretty clear at this point. Deaths per 1000 cases are way down.
For closed cases, 3.7% of COVID cases in the US have resulted in death. (total deaths)/((total deaths)+ (total recovered)).From the graph I copied on April 15, the death rate was 40%- compared to 3.7% today.

Which is why I used to copy the spreadsheets daily, but now just take a weekly look at the graphs online.

David Foster said...

Here's a useful graphing tool that has data for dozens of countries and can display it in a lot of different ways:

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/countries-normalized.html

What's surprising to me is that the Case Fatality Rate in the US is fairly high...I would think that number is largely a matter of the quality of medical care someone gets once being diagnoses, although of course demographics (mainly age) and other factors (like obesity) matter too.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Yes, I am betting that obesity, especially extreme obesity, is a factor for Americans. As African-Americans have that condition more often, I have wondered how much that is implicated in their increased death rate. That is also a reminder that the US is not entirely like the countries we (I) compare them to. We are much more diverse, and that frequently matters in medical matters.

Anonymous said...

"Our medical teams are much better at treating this and more of those infected are surviving."

Your deaths per million are not impressive. Now your comorbidity load is higher than many countries though, so that's part of it. As well your numbers were removed from the purview of the CDC quite a while ago. I don't trust em'.

BoJo, a man you consider intelligent, has had to shut the country down after fooling around for months. They are also about to leave the EU with no deal, or a very bad one. This is because the racists in Britain engineered this wildly stupid move to keep brown people out. Its likely the union will not survive this.