re: Daily COVID Updated as of 11/2/20 8:00 PM

VL, the death rate (Mortality Rate) is dropping rapidly as testing & cases increase. This is due to the simple relationship between the rapidly growing number of total tests & cases vs. the much lower growth of deaths. I expect it to continue to decline to somewhere between .2% to .8% which I think is where the true mortality rate lies. Look at the mortality graph on the tracker...its a graph of the number you are talking about.



The other number, tests to cases reported, is also on the tracker with the title Positivity rate, ie how many tests are coming back positive. It is definitely increasing even though the raw volume of tests is increasing as well. That is potentially a bad sign.

I say potentially bad because the positivity rate can (and is) skewed by focusing our testing on symptomatic cases instead of a general sampling of the population.

There is some % of our population that has or has had the virus, we don't know what that % is at this point. We can draw conclusions on the growth of the outbreak by looking at the positivity rate and is it going up or down.

If the testing volume was fixed at 4.5M tests per week (fairly close to where we are now) and on week 1 we got 10% positive results, then on week 2 we got 10%, etc... we could make an educated guess that 10% of the population had the virus. If that positive test rate dipped, then we would know that the spread of the virus is slowing (Potentially). If that positive test rate increased, then it would obviously signal growth in the outbreak.

What we're currently seeing is testing volume going up and positivity rate going up at the same time, meaning the virus is spreading. When the positivity rate starts coming down is when we know the curve is starting to turn.

This chart shows you testing volume vs positivity rate.


You can clearly see that the positivity rate was very high early on when the testing volumes were low. Then as testing volume increased, the positivity rate declined until mid-June when it started climbing again. When that positivity rate line starts to decline, then we'll know the spread is slowing.