Thought of the Day - July 19 - By The Numbers

Worldwide case numbers are now approaching 15 million. The rate of new case detection is still increasing, now by over 220,000 a day. This increase in daily new cases is now outstripping incremental improvements in therapeutics and thus the daily death date also continues to climb (https://clifffraser0.wixsite.com/covid-19/post/thought-of-the-day-july-2-incremental-covid-19-treatment-improvements).

Canada has now reached 110,000 cases. The real "numbers" story in Canada this week is that Quebec has given in and decided to more closely align with the other provinces in its definition of "recovered". Thus 23,686 people magically "recovered" in Quebec last Thursday. While I have been critical of Quebec handling of the crisis, on this it is unfortunate that the other provinces did not consider moving more toward Quebec definition, rather than just saying anyone that has left the hospital and is not been readmitted in a short period of time is considered "recovered" (https://clifffraser0.wixsite.com/covid-19/post/thought-of-the-day-may-20-what-does-recovered-mean)

This change has the effect of closing the difference between Quebec's Case Fatality (CFR) and Outcome Fatality (OFR) rates.

Please note the graph also shows how our low death rate in Canada, compared to the US, is simply a lower infection rate not better treatment.

This is more shockingly illustration with a graph from Information if Beautiful. As you see Canada is nowhere on the case per million list yet is well up in the deaths per million.

And as we are starting to see with serology antibody testing, our failure to detect is no worse than other counties (https://clifffraser0.wixsite.com/covid-19/post/thought-of-the-day-july-17-first-antibody-testing-in-bc), some of who have miss rates of over an order of magnitude, so this is not the reason for this discrepancy.

Let's hope we can turn this around by continuing to improve our protection of the most vulnerable and adopting the best therapeutic practices from around the world before our next wave starts in earnest. As you can see, like Australia, our rates are now increasing.

Cheers

Cliff