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davidbau / covid-19-chart

Chart of current COVID-19 time series data. Enables a variety of county- state- and nation-level comparisons and data exploration.
https://covid19chart.org/
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Plot ratios of deaths to confirmed cases. (discussion) #21

Open davidbau opened 4 years ago

davidbau commented 4 years ago

Everybody asks for this: what's the ratio of deaths to confirmed cases?

I am unconvinced that this ratio is a meaningful number (because both deaths and confirmed have huge sources of noise; and the time of death is shifted from the time of onset by a couple weeks, while meanwhile under exponential growth, during those two weeks the infection rate may have increased by 30-fold). A ratio will amplify the all these problems and my intuition is that such a ratio may dramatically undercount the actual peril, and will give people a very dangerous false sense of security.

At best, the number will be be almost uninterpretable.

But it is requested so often that maybe it should be an option for "advanced" mode.

Also some analysis have suggested "death divided by confirmed cases 2 weeks ago" is a better measure of something. Suggestions welcome.

davidebbo commented 4 years ago

My gut feeling is that it does seem like a potentially very fuzzy metric, to the point of having limited value.

BTW, through what channel are you getting feature requests?

davidbau commented 4 years ago

Makes sense.

Re: feature requests, when I get an email, instead of just emailing back, I also open an issue and invite them to comment or contribute.

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 8:16 PM David Ebbo notifications@github.com wrote:

My gut feeling is that it does seem like a potentially very fuzzy metric, to the point of having limited value.

BTW, through what channel are you getting feature requests?

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/davidbau/covid-19-chart/issues/21#issuecomment-606954293, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA2MN2BUWO4OZMYN7GV3A23RKKBU7ANCNFSM4LWAXTDQ .