JapaneseGamesLover said:
Yes, also people in ICU are a few. 744 in a country of 84 million people. in comparison 1,559 in UK with 66 million people 1,429 in France with 65 million people 489 in Italy with 60 million people |
Patients in ICU is great to see go down, but it is lagging behind a lot. Right now Europe needs to pay attention to if and how growth restores for a second wave while re-opening. ICU cases and reported deaths will still keep declining for a couple weeks while infections can already be on the rise again. It's the same with peaking in infections, then peaking in reported deaths a week later and peaking in active cases 4 weeks later. (ICU peak should be in between those, maybe 2 weeks after the reported case growth peak). The real infection peak will be 1 to 2 weeks before the reported cases growth peak.
In the below diagram, infection is 5 days before day 0, "Symptoms".
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/typical-covid-19-progression-1.5546949
People get infected, day 0
People start showing symptoms, day 5
People get tested, day 7+ (those that show symptoms enough to go for a test)
Test results come in, day 9+
Test results get added in daily counts, day 10+ (close to 14 days in the data from Ontario)
Hospitalization, day 12+ (10 to 12 day stay on average)
ICU admission, day 15+ (average 8 to 14 day stay, different per country)
ICU recovery about the same time as spend in the ICU.
Death, on average 23 days after infection. (generally 7 days after ICU admission)
Hospital recovery 30+ days after infection.
Thus the ICU peak is over 2 weeks behind the infection peak. ICU decline (or lowest point) is over 3 weeks behind.
What is currently important is to detect when infections start rising again. Better (earlier and faster) testing and tracing should be the focus. However, a lot of countries in Europe are currently 'playing' with the numbers, adding anti body test results (useless for detecting growth), removing presumptive cases making numbers look smaller, or switching to a different system not reporting anything atm.
For example Spain: On May 25th, the government decreased the number of total cases by 372 and the number of deaths to 26837. The discrepancy is the result of the validation of the same data by the autonomous communities and the transition to a new surveillance strategy. Discrepancies could persist for several days. We've adjusted our figures to reflect the new numbers)
The last data infometer has is 482, -372, 859, 510, 1137 reported cases and 74, -1915, 280, 0, 0 reported deaths. How do you tell what's going on with that.
ICU count is great to confirm the growth peak is/was real, but it's a greatly delayed statistic to see how re-openings are going. Yet with all the corrections and huge lag in detecting cases, it's better than nothing :/ Problem is, when you see ICU admissions going up again, it's the result of infections going up again up to 3 weeks earlier :/
