grizpsych said:
Funny, both of you simply cast my metric aside without a valid reason for why it should be discarded. Typical of shallow thinkers. Please give me an argument that I have not already stated for diminishing the relevance of my statistic.
My understanding is that the number of people who have recovered is not really being tracked, or not fully tracked. Thus, the size denominator of your formula is understated.
Current stats in your formula, or again the denominator part, are not accurate, because general identification of cases was not as accurate as it is now, and still isn't accurate.
Your denominator isn't accurate (and is low), because many people apparently have no symptoms or few symptoms, and don't get identified or tested. With more testing capability, your denominator is getting higher and more of those identified people will recover. A lower percentage of the people being identified and tested are having the identification and testing in the hospital when they are already very sick.
The percentage of people dying is going to decrease as the currently identified cases come to fruition.
MT's hospitalization rate is still fairly low, and most people who die are in the hospital. Everyone in the hospital doesn't die.
From looking at the projections for the need for ventilators, it looks like MT's need is very low. A high percentage of people who need ventilators don't make it. While I don't know, I assume that most people who die are on a ventilator.
MT's death stats seemed to be a bit skewed because it looks like one half of the deaths came from one old folks home, and one came from a 77 year old guy who got the virus on the West Coast. Thus, 2/3 of the 6 cases could be argued to be unusual, or at least a portion of the nursing home cases could be discounted.
MT's new cases peaked at 35, so far, and since then have ranged from 25 to 13 in the past 12 days, with the last 3 days being 13, 19, 13.
At least in the bigger counties in MT, the number of cases over age 59 are very low. Thus, I would expect more of the younger crowd to recover. For example, Missoula has 3 between 60-69, and 2 over 69.
I see that MT is now up to 31 hospitalizations. Had been hanging at 24 for a few days.
I see that death to recovered is now 6 to 135. A much lower percentage than when you calculated your percentage. This trend validates what I have said above.
I probably missed or goofed up some of this, because I'm not stats trained, but I know some of these things are valid.
Edit: The current reporting of deaths is very accurate, if not inflated, because everyone who has tested positive is being counted as a Covid death, whether that is the cause or not. This, according to the task force people.