Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[Mnementh]

numberwang said:

Mnementh said:

First of all, the 700 cases is the weekend decrease, it was already going up towards 1500 a day. But that isn't even the important part. The important part is: if numbers increase, and nothing is changed so that the reasons why numbers are rising are kept, then the increase will become faster and faster over time. The reason is simple. If ten infected people themself cause say 15 new infections, then 100 people cause 150 and 1000 people cause 1500. So as long as the growth rate is staying the same, the faster the infection will spread over time. If you stop that early on, than it will never reach big numbers.

Germany has increased testing to ~100K PCR tests a day (!) to create 99% negatives with a typical 0.2-5% margin of error for false positives. Nothing but statistical noise.

https://bgr.com/2020/03/26/coronavirus-testing-explains-germanys-low-covid-19-fatality-rate/

The number of tests carried out in the last weeks in germany:

week	# of tests	# of positive results	proportion of positive tests
28	510,103	2,990	0.59%
29	538,144	3,483	0.64%
30	570,681	4,464	0.78%
31	577,916	5,634	0.97%
32	672,171	6,909	1.03%

As you can see, yes number of test increased slightly. But so did the rate of positive tests. A somewhat constant margin of false positives would mean the proportion of positive results would stay the same, but instead it nearly doubled. So maybe on the lowest point (week 28) the number is dominated by false positive, but the constant rise in positive results since then must be explained differently.