Wednesday 1 April 2020

Is Covid-19 spread being contained globally, or is testing providing misleading data?

My daily plots of WHO Sitrep data suggests that the rate of increase in global cases (excluding China) has finally started to drop below the previous exponential rate of increase. On the one hand this may indicate that social distancing and lock downs in Australia, Europe, the US and elsewhere are finally having an impact (by reducing the number of people each contagious, undiagnosed case can infect). Then again, the fact that the raw deaths/cases ratio had been increasing might suggest that the number of positive test results was falling behind the actual number of cases (either because of lack of testing capacity, or simply because you don't know who should be tested).

Hopefully the number of cases globally may be heading towards a plateau around of under 10 million, and deaths may stay below 250,000-500,000. Then again, that may simply be a plateau in the developed country cases (similar to the previous plateau achieved in China), and there may be a global 'third wave' once Covid-19 spreads throughout India and sub-Saharan Africa...





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