New infections are at high levels and if not rising, they are going sideways. Only Brazil and California have falling daily infection numbers.
New deaths remain non-alarming except in Tunisia, where a steep upward trend is paired with a saturation of ICU beds.
Brazil's dream may actually not be coming to an end. Because in spite of daily infections increasing from 15.9 to 19.9 per 100K and daily deaths from 0.377 to 0.390, numbers are still trending down, and pretty stably so. Therefore I must revise my statement from 3rd.
Outlook: Very Bad With Hope
U.S. minus CA,NY,WA: Daily infections fell from 16.3 to 13.1 per 100K, reinforcing the sideways trend. Daily deaths fell a little from 0.224 to 0.217, with an unstable downward trend. The daily positive rate fell from 5.3 to 5.0% and the R-value remained almost unchanged at 1.04.
Outlook: Very Bad With Concern
France's daily infections fell from 18.8 to 15.6 per 100K and daily deaths from 0.203 to 0.098. Both are indicators of a reprieve, which is also seen in the risk map, which is unchanged from 4 days earlier. The daily positive rate, however, increased from 7.6% to 9%, which means that they are falling even more behind with testing.
Outlook: Very Bad With Concern
California's daily infections dropped from 9.1 to 4.2 per 100K and daily deaths from 0.248 to 0.071. Daily positive test rate and R-value are also lower, which is all good. The heat map, however, had twice as many counties going for the worse than for the better, which could be an indicator for something bad to happen. But only time will tell.
Outlook: Bad With Concern
Washington's daily infections fell from 7.4 to 5.3 per 100K while daily deaths remained within the very wide corridor set during the last two months. Daily infections show a stable upward trend, which is not a good sign but this could change with three more days of falling daily values. Both, positive test rate and R-value are lower and there are 1.5x more counties going for better risk than for worse.
Outlook: Bad With Concern
Britain's daily infections are rising again, from 10.3 to 21.4 per 100K, and so are daily deaths, which went from 0.070 to 0.112. The rise in cases is caused by an additional 16 000 infections that had fallen through the cracks because the health authorities had used Excel for the numbers, which has a limit of 1 million lines. Excel is good for accounting and projects using small numbers but it is not the tool of choice of statisticians working with large datasets. This does not instil confidence in Britain's numbers.
While the R-value remained unchanged at 1.45, the daily positive test ratio made a big jump from 2.7 to 4.5%, which could mean that Britian is falling behind with testing. The orange areas on the risk map have grown but London remains spared.
Outlook: Bad Getting Worse
Tunisia is getting worse while ICU beds are running out. Daily infections fell from the record high 11.2 to 8 per 100K, while daily deaths increased from 0.118 to 0.333, with a steep upward trend nevertheless. Greater Tunis has just issued a two-week nightly curfew. I predict that three weeks from now, schools and universities will close again.
Outlook: Bad Getting Worse
New York State: The upward trend continues. Daily infections fell from 8.2 to 7.2 per 100K and daily death numbers grew from 0.037 to 0.046. Both curves continue their weeklong trending up. The percentage of positive tests (1.2%) and the R-value (1.12) were unchanged. The risk map features 3x more counties going for the worse than for the better with three counties in the red.
Outlook: Satisfactory Getting Worse
Sweden: Daily infections fell from 6.6 to 3.0 per 100K with a diminished upward trend, and daily death numbers increased from 0.021 to 0.059. The country's health authority releases numbers on a weekly basis and therefore there is no new daily positive rate nor an update on the number of tests.
Outlook: Satisfactory Getting Worse
Germany's daily infections have reached a 5½-month high, having risen from 3.1 to 3.4 per 100K with a slow upward trend while daily death numbers fell from 0.023 to 0.019, thus remaining in a safe zone. The risk map has twice the number of districts going for the worse than for the better.
Outlook: Satisfactory Getting Worse
The media have not always done a good job in the last six months. Of course, they need to sell headlines and things need to be published fast, but here are a few glitches demonstrating, nine months into the pandemic, the problems we still have. While they have sometimes reported incorrect numbers, the most glaring omission is that media fail almost constantly to put numbers in context.
A recent, but mild, example: On 5 October, CNN reported the European alarm threshold as "20 cases per 100,000 people on a seven-day average". That is false. It is actually "20 cases per 100,000 people within a seven-day period," which is 7 times higher than the average they thought was right. But in the article CNN are nevertheless citing the correct numbers. So only few people noticed.
Worldwide numbers are predominantly cited as absolute numbers, irrespective of a country's population. As a consequence, the press focuses on countries with large populations, such as the US, India and Brazil.
In reality though, France currently has a higher daily infection rate (per capita) than the US ! And it should be reported like that. Every day, every minute.
On 9 August, I remarked that, while the European and North American press emphasised that Brazil's infections had hit another record high, Belgium's much higher numbers were mentioned in fine print, if at all. Anyone reading this must have thought that it was still OK to travel to Belgium. And it clearly was not. If numbers had been given per population, Belgium and Ireland would have been seen as problem countries already early into the pandemic. But they weren't.
The absolute number idiocy is also behind the belief that China was doing so poorly during February and March. Taiwan, on the other hand, if mentioned at all, was sometimes cited as having good numbers. While this is true compared to Western nations, Taiwan has had, almost from the onset of the pandemic, higher numbers than China - per capita of course.
Sweden's two average deaths in the past week looks much better than Germany's 11, but in relative numbers, Sweden had twice as many deaths per capita than Germany during the past 7 days. If numbers were reported as relative to the population, the press would maybe stop speculating about the virtues of the Swedish approach to Corona control.