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Comment by benjaminjackman | Hacker News Reader

I think doubling time is a bit faster than 5 days from what I have seen elsewhere, and that might change the math to the 25.5M in that time frame.

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Yeah the doubling time confuses me too. All the numbers from China, Italy and the Netherlands (where I am at) show the number of deaths doubling every 2 days upto the limit.

But even our dutch government is claiming it's 4 days standing in front of a chart where it's obviously 2 days.

After you reach the limit it's hard to count because people stop going to the hospital that can't take them in anyway. At that point you should just consider any increase in deaths compared to the normal the result of Corona. Wether it's a cancer treatment that got postponed because of Corona or Corona itself.

It seems like it’s difficult to get an accurate sense of the doubling rate right now, because of the confounding variable of increased testing.

You don’t have to get a sense of doubling via unreliable test data if you look at the doubling rate of the fatalities.

People count bodies much more reliably in pandemics. I don’t trust our confirmed case telemetry data much, but I do trust the fatality data. Unfortunately it’s about a two to four week lagging indicator. But the fatality rates also currently show this to be spreading much, much faster than it ever spread in Wuhan.

Wuhan is what happens when the curve is flattened. Not what happens when you don’t.

You still don't get accurate data if you just count bodies.

The issue here is every death is attributed to COVID-19 if the virus is present even if the actual reason is some other underlying health condition. Given that most victims are elderly and had serious pre-existing conditions this leads to massive mortality rate over-estimation.

You also cannot reliably compare EU/US data with Chinese: initially most deaths and cases of pneumonia in China were attributed to other illnesses. Secondly, Chinese government is notorious for flat-out lying in their official stats.

> The issue here is every death is attributed to COVID-19 if the virus is present even if the actual reason is some other underlying health condition.

That what you claim provably doesn't happen. Even old people simply don't die that fast otherwise, and we also have the data of the people who can't breath and have to be admitted to the hospitals: there were never that many cases before, happening that fast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Is_COVID-19_like_a_flu%3F...

(the numbers were compared by the Italian National Biotechnology Association, each bar is one week of time)

Right, in some countries doubling was every 3 days.

Have a look at this site: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Scroll down to "Daily New Cases in the United States". No real need to extrapolate data from other countries. New cases are doubling every 2-3 days.

Those aren't cases, those are confirmed cases. Which has more to do with how much testing we have done than how many are sick.

Problem with looking at case numbers is, you need to know how many tests have been executed. If they doubled the number of tests within those 3 days, then you measure the increase in tests, not an increase in cases.

That was the case for Italy until 4-5 days ago and I think it still is for Spain, definitely for Germany.

It feels like testing is a lagging indicator at this point. Whatever doubling happened, already happened.

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