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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I’d recommend not using “cases”, but rather deaths. Most countries don’t have the testing capacity. In fact, if you look at places like the USA testing capacity is effectively flat. Yet 20% of the tests are coming back positive...

Italy on the other hand has seen a decrease in positive rate as they are increasing testing. That’s what happens as you’re nearing Or over a peak.

All countries seem to have some method of testing / adding suspect cases of people who died. As such, that’s probably the most accurate (albeit lagging) method of comparison.

https://github.com/lettergram/covid19-analysis

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Deaths are also counted differently.

Death attribution can vary; I think deaths themselves -- as in, how many people have died, from any cause -- should be fairly reliable and comparable.

So for the clearest, most unbiased picture of COVID impact, calculate % increase over normal death rate by country, and then compare that.

(I guess. Just spitballing.)

Deaths even within the US have wildly different criteria for being counted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/which-deaths-c...

The suggestion you are responding to is not suggesting counting covid deaths.

It's suggesting we track all deaths/ Then we look at the increase in average deaths. Based on the trends we should be able to estimate how many additional (likely covid) deaths we have incurred during the crisis

The obvious problem there is the safer at home laws and lack of socializing would have an impact on your average deaths in the opposite direction. So comparing average deaths in the past to now are apples and oranges.

Yes, the unadjusted number you get will be a lower-bound. You could then try to get closer to the real number by noticing, e.g., how much car crashes were reduced and adjusting for that.

Exactly the increase in "all cause mortality" is the most honest we have at this point. But they say that number often gets adjusted in the weeks after (not sure why that is happening or acceptable).

From all my calculations i find one thing: we've been lied to a lot in the past few weeks.

People normally don't care about realtime death stats, so in many places there is a delay on reporting because nobody ever cared about doing it any other way.

Excess deaths may work, considering we are in a relatively calm time when it comes to armed conflicts and such.

Yes they are. But the "deathcount-by-COVID" will be more accurate that "positive cases". The metric I am using and will be releasing once this thing blows over is "Deaths by COVID per million of population" (as measured in the latest census)(for each country)

I'll have it like (imagine spreadsheet columns): -Country name -County population (latest census) -Deaths by COVID -Deaths per 1 million (e.g. 100 deaths / 10m pop = 10) -Date of first death -Source of population data -Source of COVID death count

I am curious to see how countries that are "too big to fail" will perform (UK, USA) in comparison to other (Harari mentioned Greece on an interview).

I was checking and so far Greece has a ~13 Vs the UK which has ~320 ("ratios").

So congrats Boris Johnson!! You just killed x24 people!! (Great choice UK voters - keep up the wise choices!!!)

This isn't about BJ specifically, this is more to show how each country treated this situation and respecting its people (these are not just numbers, these are dead people, parents, grandparents, and some very few children). It would also be useful to then process these numbers and categorise the results (I am curious to see the ratios in the Triad USA, UK, Brazil Vs other similar sized countries with different-style leaders).

I also do not expect the truth from some countries (e.g. Russia, China, any Arab peninsula countries, NK etc.) or some African countries that are torn by civil wars or other conflicts. But I believe there will be a solid baseline and the outliers (below) will be easily pointed out as ineffective measured.

Good idea. May not work well with countries reporting wrong numbers- even of deaths- on purpose, like Brazil.

Moreover in each country the definition of recovered is very different. The most strict is in Italy were you need two swabs both positives within 24h

You mean negative? That does't sound like the strictest to me. I have heard Prof. Drosten talk about tests further apart

Yeah negative sorry

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