Monday 14 September 2020

COVID19 trend plots: deaths by numbers tested

The UK now enters a new period of 'semi lockdown' with private gatherings restricted to groups of 6 people. This seems to be in response to an 'increase in confirmed cases'; but such an increase is inevitable as more people are being tested (especially young people, many of whom will not suffer any major symptoms), and with the false positive problem. It seems to me that the most relevant COVID19 trend plot should be number of deaths per 100K people tested. I've not seen such a plot  - so I just downloaded the relevant raw data from https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths and produced the following plot for the UK from 1 April 2020:

 


As the 'tail' is too small to see, here is the same data, but just from 1 May 2020


For comparison, here is the plot for the USA. Not the same kind of decrease because it is made up of many large states which had increasing infection rates at different times.

 

And another comparison is Israel, which is the first country to implement a second complete shutdown (beginning this week). The issue here is that, because numbers are relatively small and outbreaks occur mainly in very localised orthodox (Jewish and Muslim) communities, bigger variation than UK/USA is inevitable 

 


And here are the three countries together plotted on the same scale. UK now doing much better than USA and Israel (which both are similar now despite being very different in May)

 


 It does seem that the introduction now of the new UK rules is a very strange move..... 


See also https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/search/label/COVID

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