Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[SvennoJ]

NightlyPoe said:

Mnementh said:

OK, if you want total pointless information about cases per capita, you can go here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

and order the table by total cases per population. This basically orders by size of country.

Worst hit according to this is San Marino 4,126 cases per million people (the country has 140 cases total), Faroe Islands with 1,474 infection per million (72 total), Vatican City with 1,248 infection per million (1 infected). Following are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Andorra and only then Italy.

As everyone here said, that is a completely pointless statistics. SpokenTruth should continue posting his daily statistics as these are giving much more insight.

How can you say per capita is pointless information?  "Flatten the curve" is practically a mantra.  Keeping the virus low as a proportion of the total population isn't frivolous information, it's the goal.  It's the single most important datapoint in keeping the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.  It's why we should be looking at the clusters, not the raw numbers.  That's where things might go to poop.

If everyone here is saying it's a completely pointless statistic, then I'm totally right to push back because you all are being grossly misinformed.

Per capita is not that useful to measure the country wide effects of social distancing measures.

To flatten the curve you need to slow the growth rate. We don't know what is the most effective combination of measures to halt the growth and reverse it. We have some countries that went into total lock down (France, Argentina), countries that went into near lockdown (Israel) and a lot of countries with various closures while warning people to stay inside, to countries that try to keep normal life going as much as possible. Or a country like the USA that does its own thing per state.

So yeah, for the states, per state comparison would be more helpful. Per capita is not that relevant, population density is more relevant but also cultural differences and age distribution.

The amount of hospital beds per 1,000 is also an important factor which ranges from 1.3 per 1000 (Mexico) to 2.3 (UK/Ontario) to 13 per 1000 in Japan. The average for the world is about 2.7 beds per 1,000. Yet for flattening the curve the total available in a country is of course more relevant. Each country has a different peak it can deal with. (Or each state, yet since the whole US is in trouble, distribution of patients will be more difficult)

It will take a lot of computer modelling to determine the best 'package' of social distancing measures for each country / state based on all those factors.



Anyway for now it's pretty useful to compare the growth between places with different measures to see what's more effective and what's not enough. The active cases in the USA are growing faster than in Italy, no surprise since they're still doing much less than Italy. And while the US has more time before getting overwhelmed, note that every day later is another exponential increase in the peak case load. China already showed that once the growth factor finally goes under 1.0, your active case load still increases by a factor 2.5 before that peaks 13 days later. If it had peaked one day earlier, the active case peak could have been 10K less, 2 days earlier -> 23K less, 3 days earlier -> 30K less, a peak of 28K cases instead of 58K active cases.

You can't be too early, you can easily be too late.