Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[SvennoJ]

Jesus is having an effect, numbers in a lot of countries are taking a dive for Good Friday, resulting in much lower Saturday numbers. The effect might last all weekend including Easter Monday. Both reported cases and reported deaths are down in a lot of places. Not that the virus takes a break of course, but the people testing and reporting can desperately use a break.

Europe has been working through a lot of corrections from France, UK, Ireland, Belgium, all changing/updating reported cases and deaths. it's starting to stabilize again and (now without Turkey) is back to an avg 36K new cases per day, before Easter will artificially take it down. The USA is also seeing the Easter effect but to a lesser extent so far or perhaps there was more growth left to discover. The USA was averaging 33K new cases per day at the end of the week.

Europe has been sort of stable for 2 weeks currently, the USA for about a week, what's interesting is that the percentage of reported deaths vs reported cases is very different:
Europe: 11.4%
USA: 5.9%
World: 7.8%
Either the USA is testing twice as much as Europe, or the USA is under reporting deaths, or the virus is half as deadly in the USA. I doubt the last part. The strain going around in the USA is slightly different from the one in Europe but the experts say this has no effect on the virus, it's only a few base pairs, just enough to identify the mutation.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
Europe has been adding nursing home deaths (not everywhere though) while the USA afaik still only counts identified covid19 deaths in hospitals.

The differences in Europe are big as well:
Spain: 12.4% reported cases are going down sooner than deaths, 8.5% compared to peak reported cases
Italy: 14% reported cases are going down sooner than deaths, 10% compared to the peak reported cases
France: 18% adding nursing home deaths
Germany: 4.3%

Not a lot of consistency between countries' reporting methods.