Re:U.S. adds just 266,000 jobs in April, far below expectations
by soperj on Friday May 07, 2021 @03:29PM
(#27079953)
>What's the better metric?
The question was rhetorical. There is no better metric for showing the pandemic is still on going. If you have 50k cases a day, and 1000 deaths a day, it doesn't matter if other countries are lower or higher, it's clearly on going.
Re:U.S. adds just 266,000 jobs in April, far below expectations
by Rebelgecko on Friday May 07, 2021 @04:28PM
(#27080506)
Right now the 7 day avg is below 700 deaths per day and has been steadily declining since the peak in January when it was over 3,000. There's been roughly a 5x reduction in cases as well (45k cases per day over last week down from 260k per day over the worst week in January). To me the strong downward trend indicates that we're cruising towards the end of the pandemic. I can't see it lasting another 4 months, let alone another year (although the COVID rate might never return to 0).
How many deaths per day would you use as a threshold for being past the middle of the pandemic?
>Would it be better to point out that just under a 1000 people a day are still dying from it in the US?
No, any sort of absolute count is going to be equally misleading. For example my city had 5 covid deaths yesterday. Does that mean that we're 200x safer than the rest of the US? Of course not, it just means that you're comparing two populations of different size.
>What's the better metric?
Anything that's normalized by population size. For example per capita new cases or per capita deaths.