NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Making sense of the coronavirus pandemic requires getting up to speed on semantics as much as epidemiology.. Read more at straitstimes.com.
NEW YORK - Making sense of the coronavirus pandemic requires getting up to speed on semantics as much as epidemiology.
"The new cases or deaths each day are given as exact numbers and we're trained to take that at face value," said Associate Professor Mark N. Lurie, an epidemiologist at Brown University's School of Public Health."But those are far from exact, they're deeply flawed, and their meaning varies from place to place and from time period to time period."
Few countries have done aggressive testing. And of course, the more testing there is, the more cases are found. But it matters not only how many people are tested, but also when, and who they are. Once again, countries differ, shaping what the numbers mean. But most nations with large numbers of cases have done less testing, waited longer to do it in bulk, and made little attempt at contact tracing. They find themselves playing catch-up with the virus, ramping up testing after their outbreaks had already mushroomed.
Italy and France have reported death tolls that generally included only those who died in hospitals. In Germany, even some of those patients are excluded, because post-mortem testing for the virus is not standard in hospitals. When an outbreak is growing unchecked, more people become infected and more die each day than the day before. Italy went from reporting a few hundred newly detected infections per day in early March to more than 6,500 on March 21.
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