3DDRR update

1.090 overall, 1.11 outside of New York state.

I am seeing a lot more stories featuring overall excess deaths, because of doubts about virus death counts. But I will stick with the 3DDRR indicator.

I saw a headline that said that the models think we are headed for an increase in deaths. I don’t see that. I see a downward trend. Not as steeply sloped as I would like, but still downward.

In order to forecast fatalities going forward, what you really need is an indicator that predicts infection rates in nursing homes. If you could promise me that nursing homes will do a better job of keeping out the virus going forward, then I would promise that the deaths per week from the virus will fall rather than rise.

6 thoughts on “3DDRR update

  1. I’m also increasingly looking at excess death figures, since indeed as you say the other measurements are too inconsistent, with different countries counting coronavirus deaths in different ways. The chart in this FT article from April 26 shows just how vast that difference is in the selected EU countries; Austria and Denmark and Sweden are doing fine, with hardly any more deaths than they would have normally had during this period, whereas e.g. the Netherlands and Belgium are doing terribly. I think the excess deaths figure is the one that those countries’ leaders should be assessed by; the rest is just noise.

  2. The last time I looked at mortality in the US for March/April, deaths were actually way down everywhere but New York and New Jersey- down by a lot. I will look them up again tonight, but I don’t expect to see a change.

  3. People with cancer and heart disease are dying because their governors have prohibited treatment of non-Covid conditions, so “excess deaths “ might not mean what you think it means.

    “‘I think the toll on non-Covid patients will be much greater than Covid deaths,’ he said.”

    https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2009984

  4. I agree that nursing homes are key. That raises the issue: Is an economy-wide lockdown keeping covid-19 out of nursing homes? I find implausible that this is noticeably better than simply locking down nursing homes. Your nursing home observation also suggests a refinement to 3DDRR that excludes nursing homes.

  5. Quartering the nursing home is a triadic response which I got from one of the papers.

    Matching the neighborhood response to the neighborhood size such that out breaks there are not predictable and no two neighborhoods share the infection.

  6. How many empty beds do the nursing homes have because of Cov-19 ?
    How rapidly will they fill them. In other words, do they have waiting list?
    Or will the better homes find the people on their list are already elsewhere?
    Will people be more reluctant to move their loved ones in to nursing homes?
    Are the remaining nursing home patients still patients because they have
    some immunity to Cov-19? Or, are they just healthier?

    You need to answer these questions to estimate future nursing home deaths.

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