Re: Coronavirus Health - Health and Wellbeing
Posted: October 6th, 2020, 6:55 am
neversay wrote: than tested positive cases which are leading indicators of hospitalisations and then deaths.
This is an interesting question. I personally am not sure that PCR positive tests are actually leading indicators of hospitalisations. People carrying the virus can be PCR positive for quite a bit of time (definitely over 3 weeks, but it varies). Depending upon how the test is done it can pick up viruses that have been inactivated. Hence apart from the fact that PCR positive tests are skewed by sampling and test the prevalence whilst we want the first derivative in respect of time, they may actually lag hospitalisations or be around the same time and do not necessarily lead.
The daily variations in percentage prevalance in the tests recently do not seem statistically significant as they are moving by too much in a day. It appears also that a high proportion of the testing is of cohorts of students and school children. Once that has stabilised one would expect to see a drop in new "case" numbers. That, however, would be meaningless.