Re:Vilified early over Covid-19 strategy, Sweden seems to ha...
by rossdavidh on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @07:22PM
(#24645280)
Well you are correct about the reliability factor. In theory, we could have randomly tested, but for reasons that escape me this was done almost nowhere. Deaths is more reliable.
However, the metric that is actually at least attempting to measure the underlying reality of interest, here, is not deaths, but cases, that's my only point. But I totally concede that in some cases deaths may be the less bad metric for cases, than confirmed cases.
Re:Vilified early over Covid-19 strategy, Sweden seems to ha...
by Gwypaas on Thursday October 01, 2020 @02:33AM
(#24647983)
Sweden actually does it. It's PCR tests to track the number and change in ongoing infections in the whole population.
0.9% end of April
0.3% end of May
Zero of the tested were infected end of August
End of September is being published next week
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/nyheter-och-press/nyhets...
To get a good estimate we'd have to randomly test the population, instead of measuring people with symptoms. Since a lot of people are asymptomatic or don't get a test since they don't feel too sick. Picking people at random would give us a good overview of active cases.
In March in Germany they were reporting a doubling of cases on TV every day, but they failed to mention that they had administered almost twice the tests as well. So basically the number we were measuring was the number of tests we could administer, which was naturally rising as testing capacities expanded, not the number of Corona cases.
Deaths just seem way more reliable a measure.