Coronavirus

One of the requirements that the President set on April 16 th for reopening  the country is that the state or region must   show. 14 consecutive days of declining daily case counts   No state has met this criterion in the strict sense.   For some of the states that have reopened or announced reopening soon such as Minnesota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, and Colorado the latest 14-day   trend in their case counts is actually upward and they should definitely not ease any of the restrictions they have in place.   For some of the reopening states such as Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi the trend is mostly flat and not downward.   Only for Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana, are the most recent two-week trend edging downward.   The alternate gating criterion of a downward trajectory of positive tests as a percentage of total tests has also not been met by most states.   This criterion makes more sense in those situations wher

When we look at the cumulative confirmed cases and fatality data for close to two hundred countries, it seems quite remarkable that some countries seem to do 10 times better than other countries in terms of case fatality rate.   We might conclude that the novel coronavirus discriminates by country or that certain countries manage their pandemics much better than others.   The truth is more complicated.   When examining mortality rates two issues are important: how we count deaths and how we test patients.   The case  fatality rate is a straightforward statistic calculated by dividing number of confirmed deaths by the number of confirmed cases for any group or subgroup of patients.   For an ongoing pandemic, this statistic is almost always understated.   Firstly, because it generally takes several days for a confirmed case to resolve itself into death or a cure, so the denominator using the current case count is overstated.   Secondly, many deaths occur outside the healthcare system