Covid-19 numbers can create public confusion over outcomes for the vaccinated

Simpler, clearer indicators can help the public interpret the sea of data on COVID-19 and avoid cognitive biases, says Duke-NUS’ David Matchar...

Read here (Channel News Asia, Nov 26, 2021)

As Covid sweeps India, experts say cases and deaths are going unreported

‘India, home to the world's worst ongoing coronavirus outbreak, has reported more than 17.6 million cases since the pandemic began last year. But the real number, experts fear, could be up to 30 times higher -- meaning more than half a billion cases. Health workers and scientists in India have long warned that Covid-19 infections and related deaths are significantly underreported for several reasons, including poor infrastructure, human error, and low testing levels.’

Read here (CNN, Apr 28, 2021)

Covid-19, lies and statistics: Corruption and the pandemic

• Data on COVID-19 deaths and cases goes underreported in many countries
• Malpractice in procurement of vaccines, protective equipment is widespread
• Corruption and secrecy is putting lives at risk, experts warn

‘From Brazil to the Philippines, secretive governments across the world are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by covering up data and bypassing public procurement rules, undermining trust in health systems, fuelling anti-vaxxers and putting immunisation campaigns at risk.

‘Clandestine contracts for medical goods and services have become the norm in many countries, while data on COVID-19 cases and deaths has been manipulated and underreported.

‘Authorities and heads of states have used the pandemic as an opportunity to gut public bodies dedicated to openness and communication, with the worst offenders forming a rogues’ gallery of coronavirus offenders.’

Read here (SciDev, Apr 6, 2021)

Coronavirus fact-check #10: Why “new cases” are plummeting... ‘It's not vaccines, it's not lockdown’

‘Essentially, in two memos the WHO ensured future testing would be less likely to produce false positives and made it much harder to be labelled an “asymptomatic case”.

‘In short, logic would suggest we’re not in fact seeing a “decline in Covid cases” or a “decrease in Covid deaths” at all.

‘What we’re seeing is a decline in perfectly healthy people being labelled “covid cases” based on a false positive from an unreliable testing process. And we’re seeing fewer people dying of pneumonia, cancer or other disease have “Covid19” added to their death certificate based on testing criteria designed to inflate the pandemic.’

Read here (Off Guardian, Feb 26, 2021)

Breaking down the psychology of vaccine hesitancy

• 40% of respondents fell into the enthusiastic camp and reported eagerness to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
• Another 20% were in the watchful group, which means they weren't against the vaccine, but were worried about side effects and didn't want to be first in line.
• 14% were classified as cost-anxious — they tended to be younger and live in rural areas, and they perceived that the costs of the vaccine in time and money exceeded the benefits.
• 9% were system distrusters, who were more likely to be minorities, and believed the vaccine had not been adequately tested for their group.
• The last 17% were conspiracy believers who tended to be Republican and had little fear of COVID-19 itself. They often subscribed to more outlandish and harmful theories about vaccines.

Read here (Axios, Feb 20, 2021)

‘India’s Covid-19 infections grossly underestimated’

‘India’s southern state of Karnataka alone may have had 31.5 million cases of COVID-19 or nearly 95 times greater than have been reported, says a new study that puts a question mark on the 10 million plus cases reported for the whole country so far.

‘Published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study is based on data collected from a representative sample of households in 20 districts of Karnataka, home to 70 million of India’s 1.3 billion people.’

Read here (SciDev, Feb 17, 2021)

The mystery of India's plummeting Covid-19 cases

‘Last September, India was confirming nearly 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day. It was on track to overtake the United States to become the country with the highest reported COVID-19 caseload in the world. Hospitals were full. The Indian economy nosedived into an unprecedented recession.

‘But four months later, India's coronavirus numbers have plummeted. Late last month, on Jan. 26, the country's Health Ministry confirmed a record low of about 9,100 new daily cases — in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. It was India's lowest daily tally in eight months. On Monday, India confirmed about 11,000 cases.

"It's not that India is testing less or things are going underreported," says Jishnu Das, a health economist at Georgetown University. "It's been rising, rising — and now suddenly, it's vanished! I mean, hospital ICU utilization has gone down. Every indicator says the numbers are down." Scientists say it's a mystery. They're probing why India's coronavirus numbers have declined so dramatically — and so suddenly, in September and October, months before any vaccinations began.

‘They're trying to figure out what Indians may be doing right and how to mimic that in other countries that are still suffering.’

Read here (NPR, Feb 1, 2021)

The prevalence of long Covid symptoms and Covid-19 complications (plus updated estimates)

‘The UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) published data regarding the prevalence of symptoms associated with “long COVID” in patients who recovered from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection. The data indicate that approximately 20% of infected individuals exhibit symptoms for 5 weeks or longer, and 10% report symptoms for 12 weeks or longer. This corresponds to an estimated 186,000 individuals in England with symptoms lasting between 5 and 12 weeks. The findings are based on responses to the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey, which utilizes a nationally representative sample from across the UK, and efforts are ongoing to gather additional data, including on symptoms that persist longer than 12 weeks. A more detailed look at the available data shows that prevalence of long COVID symptoms* tends to increase with age, peaking in the 35-49 years (26.8%) and 50-69 years (26.1%) age groups, compared to the 2-11 years (12.9%) and 12-16 years (14.5%) age groups. Additionally, there appears to be a statistically significant increase in prevalence among women (23.6%) compared to men (20.7%).’

Read here (Office for NationaL Statistics, UK, Dec 16, 2020)

Read here for update (Office for NationaL Statistics, UK, Jan 21, 2021)

NIH: 80% of Malaysia’s 157 coronavirus fatalities had at least one underlying medical condition; 72 per cent male; those aged 60-69 the largest group at 30.6 per cent

NIH: 80% of Malaysia’s 157 coronavirus fatalities had at least one underlying medical condition; 72 per cent male; those aged 60-69 the largest group at 30.6 per cent

‘More than 80 per cent of Covid-19 deaths in Malaysia reportedly had at least one underlying medical condition, said ICR. ICR also found that significantly more men in Malaysia succumbed to Covid-19 at 72 per cent, compared to women at 28 per cent.

‘More than 65 per cent of Malaysia’s coronavirus deaths were aged 60 years and above. Those aged 60 to 69 years formed the largest age group among Malaysia’s Covid-19 fatalities at 30.6 per cent, followed by people aged 70 to 79 years at 21 per cent, and those aged 50 to 59 years at 19.1 per cent. Adults aged 80 years and above comprised 14 per cent of coronavirus deaths in Malaysia.’

Read here (Code Blue, Oct 13, 2020)

Facts v feelings: How to stop our emotions misleading us -- Tim Harford

‘The pandemic has shown how a lack of solid statistics can be dangerous. But even with the firmest of evidence, we often end up ignoring the facts we don’t like...’ This is also shown in evidence from two other areas: (1) Coffee and breast cysts and (2) Climate change. They should inform our reaction to Covid-19 and other matters...

‘When it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realise that our feelings can trump our expertise. This explains why we buy things we don’t need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, or vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why we so often buy into statistical claims that even a moment’s thought would tell us cannot be true. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. Psychologist Ziva Kunda found this effect in the lab, when she showed experimental subjects an article laying out the evidence that coffee or other sources of caffeine could increase the risk to women of developing breast cysts. Most people found the article pretty convincing. Women who drank a lot of coffee did not...

‘Scientific evidence is scientific evidence. Our beliefs around climate change shouldn’t skew left and right. But they do. This gap became wider the more education people had. Among those with no college education, 45% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans worried “a great deal” about climate change. Yet among those with a college education, the figures were 50% of Democrats and 8% of Republicans. A similar pattern holds if you measure scientific literacy: more scientifically literate Republicans and Democrats are further apart than those who know very little about science.’

Read here (The Guardian, Sept 10, 2020)

Governments losing support for their handling of Covid-19: Survey

‘Governments are fast losing support for their handling of the coronavirus outbreak from a public that widely believes death and infection figures to be higher than statistics show, a survey of six countries [US, Britain, France, Sweden, Japan and Germany] revealed on Saturday (July 25).’

Read here (Straits Times, July 25, 2020)

What’s at risk: An 18-month view of a post-Covid world

 ‘As the world continues to grapple with the effects of COVID-19, no part of society seems to be left unscathed. Fears are surmounting around the economy’s health, and dramatic changes in life as we know it are also underway.

‘In today’s graphic, we use data from a World Economic Forum survey of 347 risk analysts on how they rank the likelihood of major risks we face in the aftermath of the pandemic. What are the most likely risks for the world over the next year and a half?’

Read here (Visual Capitalist, June 24, 2020)

Coronavirus antibody tests have a mathematical pitfall

‘...such [antibody] tests have been proposed as a way for individuals to find out if they have already been infected with the novel coronavirus. But a mathematical wrinkle makes these tests—and in fact, all screening tests—hard to interpret: even with a very accurate test, the fewer people in a population who have a condition, the more likely it is that an individual's positive result is wrong. If it is, people might think they have the antibodies (and thus may have immunity), when in fact they do not.

‘A positive screening test result for other diseases usually prompts follow-up testing to confirm a diagnosis. But for COVID-19 screening, such follow-up has been rare because testing resources are scarce or because other testing methods are prioritized for the sickest patients. Here's a look at the massive impact infection rates can have on the predictive value of these tests for individuals.’

Read here (Scientific American, July 2020, pre-published in June 19, 2020)

K number: What is the coronavirus metric that could be crucial as lockdown eases?

‘K sheds light on the variation behind R. “Some [infectious] people might generate a lot of secondary cases because of the event they attend, for example, and other people may not generate many secondary cases at all,” said Dr Adam Kucharski, an expert in the dynamics of infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “K is the statistical value that tells us how much variation there is in that distribution.” But unlike R, K numbers are not intuitive. “The general rule is that the smaller the K value is, the more transmission comes from a smaller number of infectious people,” said Kucharski.’

Read here (The Guardian, June 1, 2020)

Children and Covid-19: Systematic review of 18 studies

A systematic review of 18 studies shows most children had mild symptoms, if any, and generally required supportive care only. Typically, they had a good prognosis and recovered within 1 to 2 weeks. ‘In this systematic review of 18 studies with 1065 participants, most pediatric patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection presented with fever, dry cough, and fatigue or were asymptomatic; 1 infant presented with pneumonia, complicated by shock and kidney failure, and was successfully treated with intensive care. Most pediatric patients were hospitalised, and symptomatic children received mainly supportive care; no deaths were reported in the age range of 0 to 9 years.’

Read here (JamaNetwork, April 22, 2020)

The number of new cases of Covid-19 in US has plateaued: Is this a good sign?

‘But there is another way to interpret the decline in new cases: The growth in the number of new tests completed per day has also plateaued. Since April 1, the country has tested roughly 145,000 people every day with no steady upward trajectory. The growth in the number of new cases per day, and the growth in the number of new tests per day, are very tightly correlated.

‘This tight correlation suggests that if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. And combined with the high test-positivity rate, it suggests that the reservoir of unknown, uncounted cases of COVID-19 across the country is still very large.

‘Each of those uncounted cases is a small tragedy and a microcosm of all the ways the U.S. testing infrastructure is still failing...’

Read here (The Atlantic, April 16, 2020)

Many Malaysians say not financially prepared for an extended MCO — Survey released by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM)

‘Generally, more than half of survey respondents (52.6%) said they were most affected when it came to financial savings, whereas 6.2% said they were least affected. Two-thirds or 71.4% of self-employed respondents said they have sufficient savings for less than one month.’

Read here (The Edge, April 9, 2020)