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The true numbers of Covid-19 deaths is continually questioned from both sides of the lockdown debate, with claims of rampant under and over reporting. Those who see governments’ reactions to the pandemic as exaggerated tend to claim that anyone dying with Covid-like symptoms is logged as a victim of the virus even in the absence of a positive test result and despite the severity of co-morbidities. They often go further and claim that hospitals are incentivized to keep Covid numbers high, due to the increased compensation they receive for coronavirus…read more

Today I’m taking a look at why the United States Covid-19 death curve is following neither the same trajectory as most European countries, nor that of most South American countries. It seems to have the same initial peak as Italy, but then a post-peak surge that matches Brazil: So, what’s going on? Well, first it’s worth understanding why Italy and Brazil are on such different journeys. The figure below shows the 4 classic curves for Temperate and Tropical climates in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Italy obviously has a Northern…read more

It’s been more than 3 months since Update 19, and your experience over that time will depend on where you live. At the risk of generalizing, if you are in a relatively small European country with a strong central government that shut-down effectively then it’s likely that high infection rates were limited to one or two initial areas (Lombardy, Catalonia, Greater London), so you will have seen daily case numbers fall by >95% and stay low for several months : Whereas if you live in a large country with a…read more

For the first 3 months of the outbreak I laboriously copied data by hand from Worldometers into an Excel spreadsheet and tried to identify interesting patterns to share with friends in Italy, Germany, the UK and US. This was particularly useful in the early days as we could report how badly the UK and US were underestimating the impact that the virus would have on their populations, and later on we could see how effective lockdown measures proved to be in the countries that implemented them quickly and early. Recently,…read more

After several weeks in lockdown, several parts of the world are starting to ease restrictions on movement. Concentrating on our 4 countries, probably the graph which best illustrates this dynamic is our slowdown-chart. We’ll concentrate on cases as they lead deaths by 2-3 weeks : The US is yet to dip on its way to a million cases; the UK has levelled off; Italy has stalled, but without seeing a true decline, and Germany is in free-fall. There have been a few headlines recently predicting that the UK could end…read more

Very brief update today – just with the latest Rt charts from Italy, the US, and now also England (sorry – not found reasonable data for Scotland yet). For those of you who are interested, here is the whole calculation laid out.

Warning : the widely circulated article on which I based the last section of this post has been partially debunked. Thanks to Simone Naso’s alert in the comments section that points to this in-depth review of the article (in Italian). The investigation found that the statements in the article came from a private medical forum and were improperly published by persons unknown under a fake name (Prof Giannini). It remarkably concludes that although the article itself should be considered “fake news”, the information in it may prove to be correct..!…read more

Here are the charts that tell you if it’s safe to end the lockdown in your area OK, so we’re going to change it up a little for this update. Yesterday I spotted that Kevin Systrom (one of the Instagram founders) had launched a new website that is tracking the Rt of COVID-19 in US States in realtime. I’ll let him describe Rt in his own words : In any epidemic, ?? is the measure known as the effective reproduction number. It’s the number of people who become infected per infectious person…read more

Let’s kick off with an adjustment to Update 13 in which I calculated the total number of people in Italy with immunity based (1.7M) on the projected final death toll (24k). On the positive side, the last two days numbers show a steeper curve than I thought, which should mean slightly lower final numbers : On the other hand, I didn’t consider the fact that not every Covid-19 death may not be counted in the official numbers. As in most countries, deaths outside of hospitals are generally not attributed to…read more

So, when can we relax the lockdown and get the global economy started again? Well, first of all, every country is on its own trajectory, so there’s no single answer to that question, but let’s look at Italy and extrapolate from there. .. What we really need to know is “have enough people been infected for us to have acquired any level of herd immunity?” Back in Update 6 we discussed the true number of infections in Italy at the time the lockdown was announced on March 9th. We calculated…read more