statefan91 said:
Awesome - glad to see.
Another question for anyone really - why does # of cases matter in terms of what is reported? Shouldn't it be # of ACTIVE cases? Everything being done is driven off of not overloading our HC system and trying to prolong the spread, so shouldn't the number of concurrent cases be the most relevant data point?
The number of actual cases is important for determining the case fatality rate (CFR). If you only include the confirmed cases, it will drastically over-inflate the CFR and give you a death rate that is much higher than you would expect to see. For example, in NC if you calculate the CFR based on confirmed cases and deaths, you get a CFR of 2%. This is really too high and in countries that have done a great deal more testing than NC (or the US), the CFR is much lower - in some cases below 1%. Even at a CFR of 2%, this means 98% of people will get the virus and survive.
Given the limited amount of testing being done, I have focused more on hospitalizations than I have on cases, since those are only cases verified by a lab. I have also looked at hospitalization as a percentage of total cases and this has ranged from 6% to the 11%. It is not an exact measure, since I am only able to see total cases and not total active cases.
Someone yesterday tweeted out that NC had over 5,000 active cases of Covid and this is entirely inaccurate. I corrected them by pointing out that 5,000 is the total number of confirmed cases, since testing began. It does not subtract out those people who are now over the virus and are no longer an infection risk.