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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

> but the trajectories don't lie

Except for when they do. Easter just passed and the the trajectories are plotted up to and including today, when Sweden for example is adding deaths to dates two weeks back every day, and the last 5-7 days _ALWAYS_ looks like a downward trajectory. The last little spike there from before easter has grown by 35% since after easter and is still growing daily.

You can't draw conclusions based on the trajectory of the last few days when an absolute majority of cases are added days, and up to weeks after.

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Sure, but in that chart Italy for example has had a declining graph for over two weeks, which means you can be reasonably sure it's not growing exponentially there.

And in Sweden's case, if you also look at the number of ICU admissions, they've been flat for weeks, and those numbers have very little lag.

I'm not saying everything is fine, I'm not saying we're over the peak, but I am saying that it's not the case that any country is experiencing uncontrolled exponential growth and is going to turn into a zombie wasteland in a couple of days.

"ICU admissions [...] have very little lag."

Sweden's ICU admissions number for a particular day usually takes a week or two to settle down.

For instance, here's how the numbers were updated each following day for the number of ICU admissions on the second of April: 42, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 48, 49, 49, 49, 49, 52. So it took until the 14. of April for the reporting of the second of April to settle down---and we still don't know if it's going to change again or not.

Source: I copied the numbers from the official site https://www.icuregswe.org/data--resultat/covid-19-i-svensk-i...

As far as I can tell, the official site doesn't record a history of what they reported, so the history is just what I manually copied to a file once a day when I happened to look.

Do I think the lag is crucial? No. But it's unexpected to me.

You have to ask what phenomenon causes an exponential increase in deaths/day and does not increase ICU utilization. The answer I’ve seen seems to be “yes, the disease is killing a steadily growing number of people but they’re older and aren’t going to the ICU before they die.” This is where Italy was at one point; they just got there much later.

As someone pointed out to me, the euromomo website is useful for this, it tracks the total mortality rate across Europe and compares it with the historical data.

By ignoring the hospitalized/homestuck difference one can have a clearer idea of what is happening. Sadly I don't know of a way to get the data for the whole world.

Another note on mortality tracking is that everyone is staring themselves blind on corona-related deaths, and comparing between countries, and exclaiming that the higher the death rate per capita is, the more of a failure the country's policies are.

But this isn't necessarily true. You have to look at the total mortality, and the excess mortality. If a country has high corona mortality, but no excess mortality, it means that most people dying from coronavirus are people who normally would have died from something else anyway. And whatever policies that country has have to be good enough.

If a country has high corona mortality and excess mortality, then it's fair to say that that country's policies aren't enough, and it's fair to have the discussion whether you could do more or should do more.

Euromomo data is really interesting to me because of these two points: 1) the spike in death rate caused by Covid-19 this year is of the same magnitude as the normal flu season spike in 2016 2) this year's flue season spike was low compared to recent years. Maybe due to a warmer summer?

One interpretation could be that a large number of vulnerable people escaped death from regular ILIs this European season, only to sadly succome to this pandemic.

When looking at a single region like Bergamo, the death toll is four times higher than normal... Absolutely nothing like a normal flu season spike. See graph in http://archive.is/AaJ76

If you look at the euromomo information for a country it is averaged across all regions, that includes those regions that started lockdown before severe outbreak, so the spike averages down to be small. I.e. you can’t look at the country info and make conclusions about the severity of the disease.

Agree with your points although the link was blocked for me.

Do you think that a very mild flu season could possibly have made this outbreak worse?

> Agree with your points although the link was blocked for me.

Euromomo [1] has per country breakdown. While some countries are relatively unaffected (yet?), bringing the average down, some, like Italy, Uk, Spain are way beyond the 2017 peak.

As pointed elsethread, possibly because of lockdown, at least in Italy, the worst has been confined to the northen regions (about one fourth of the population but more than half the confirmed cases). If allowed to spread equally everywhere, the numbers would presumably be higher.

[1] https://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country_total.html

> link was blocked for me

That will be because you are using 1.1.1.1 for your DNS: archive.org has decided to give a bung IP to CloudFlare just because... (personally I think CloudFlare are doing the right thing here - protecting your privacy - unfortunately archive disagree. I think archive are wrong since DNS is often cached which is much the same).

> 1) the spike in death rate caused by Covid-19 this year is of the same magnitude as the normal flu season spike in 2016

the current number depends on lockdown measures. We didn't have lockdowns in 2016, and it is likely if we didn't have them now we'd be much worse. You can look at the graph for Sweden which decided to only apply mild measures for a comparison which shows this is much worse than the 16/17 flu.

The rest of the reasoning is still correct, and I have heard it pointed out before, though I believe you meant warmer _winter_ :)

But all the countries did introduce various measures to slow down the spread. Otherwise nobody could claim that the numbers remained compatable.

Yes, which is wonderful. I am wondering what caused the large 2016 spike. Another interesting thing is the effect any behaviour changes are going to have on regular flu numbers. It's already looking to have a big effect in then southern hemisphere.

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