Analysis – Saturday, 2 April 2022

No April Joke
The tunnel became longer and the light at the end fainter but there is still light at the end.

I have been doing these numbers for over two years now and if I have learnt one thing then, it is that a daily death number below 0.1 per 100 000 is a good sign. If the curve remains safely below that threshold for about a month, I would personally feel safe, particularly in well aerated spaces. I posit that this would be a good threshold for unmasking. The Western European or North American countries that have unmasked were all above that threshold and most of these places see additional deaths. One can now speculate that these countries had not seen these deaths had they kept their masks on.

Washington State is reporting their testing data again and the test positive rate is below the desired 5% mark, which is great. The incidence is rather low but its decline is slowing down, which could foreshadow a development that Europe has seen for a month.

In the USA, incidence is stalling at a rather low level and death numbers are stalling at a too high level. Without a mask mandate as a buffer and with abysmally low vaccine protection (for a rich country), the Omicron BA.2 variant could push case numbers up again.

Quo vadis, Germania? Incidence is near world record, daily death numbers are in the upper echelon and increasing, ITU numbers are timidly increasing. The latter are reported with one month delay though (the famous German fax machines plus not enough personnel for typing the data into the computer). Yet, lawmakers have decided to link state intervention to hospitalisation data. And hence, the masks will drop in two days. Politics have just declared bankruptcy.

Britain's incidence has peaked but ITU (ICU) and death numbers are still climbing. If things go as predicted from other countries, death numbers should start falling again two weeks from now. 

In France the renewed surge in cases is causing more deaths. It is hard to predict when numbers will start to revert again.

Tunisia is fooling itself by first ditching their daily updates and thus making trends harder to spot. In addition, they perform so few test that their actual incidence is 10x higher than reported. This severe under-reporting extends to the ITU numbers (5x higher) and mortality (3x higher).
What is puzzling is that mortality is increasing but incidence is not. One explanation is that the low number of tests obscure a renewed upswing in new cases, which is supported by an increasing R-value. Speaking against this explanation is a sharply falling test positive rate (from a high of 50% to currently just over 10%). The next weeks will tell.