This is also called the number of daily infections.
It is the number of people who test positive on each day by PCR testing (which includes the ones that are truly sick but also those without symptoms), divided by the number of people living in the country or region. The resulting number is reported as "per 100 000 people" averaged over 14 days and is thus more or less comparable to other countries or regions.
The incidence number is often changed retroactively because it is initially entered with the date of reporting and later, when more details are known, with the date when the person became positive. This date can be many days earlier. Thus, the data can change several weeks back.
Number reporting in this blog is very different from that in the usual news sources, which report mostly absolute values. A country with many people living in it could then seem to have a lot of infections while smaller countries would have fewer.
By not reporting relative numbers, one exaggerates the problem in countries with large populations (such as the US or India) and one belittles the issue in smaller countries, such as in Belgium. The latter country is the seat of many European institutions and thus sees a lot of international traffic; therefore, the reporting of absolute incidence numbers could make travellers feel safe when in reality they might have been in greater danger of infection than in their home country; and, in the worst case, carry the virus back.
This is the number of people who are reported as having died form Corona-related illness (confirmed numbers) on each day divided by the number of people living in the country or region. The resulting number is reported as "per 100 000 people" averaged over 14 or 21 days and is thus more or less comparable to other countries or regions.
The number of fatalities is often changed retroactively because a death is initially entered with the date of reporting and later, when more details are known, with the death date. Therefore, numbers can change many weeks back.
Also, as reported by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle (see their site), and mentioned on this blog on 2021-05-08, the confirmed death numbers do rarely reflect the actual death numbers, in fact, in some countries the latter can be up to 10 times higher.
Number reporting in this blog is very different from that in the usual news sources, which report mostly absolute values. A country with many people living in it could then seem to have a lot of deaths while smaller countries would have fewer.
By not reporting relative numbers, one exaggerates the problem in countries with large populations (such as the US or India) and one belittles the issue in smaller countries, such as in Belgium. The latter country is the seat of many European institutions and thus sees a lot of international traffic; therefore, the reporting of absolute death numbers could make travellers feel safe when in reality they might have been in greater danger of infection than in their home country; and, in the worst case, carry the virus back.
This is also called the daily ICU in the US and shows the number of people in intensive care.
Hospitalisation data are not as accurate as health status data due to factors including incomplete reporting, delayed reporting or differences in definitions. Therefore these numbers cannot easily be compared between countries. But the tendency (up, flat or down) is a very good indicator for the course of the pandemic in each country or region.
I calculate the value as the number of people in the intensive treatment units divided by the number of people living in the country or region. The resulting number is reported as "per 100 000 people" averaged over 14 days.
This number is calculated over the entire period of the pandemic, that is, since the beginning of 2020, and put in relation to the usual death numbers before the pandemic.
The reference is the average death for each country or region during a four-year period prior to the pandemic (typically 2016-2019).
The daily excess death, calculated as the daily death number divided by the average of daily deaths (reference divided by 365), is then averaged across a period starting on 23 February 2020 until the most recent day of reporting.
This number is then presented as the Cumulative Average Excess Death number. For reasons of shortness in reporting, the "average" is left out from the name. In spite of it being cumulative, owing to it being averaged across two years, the Cumulative Average Excess Death number increases during months of mortality and decreases when death numbers are going down over several months.
Also called Basic Reproduction number R0 ("ar zero"), which is the expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to infection.
It is similar to the Effective Reproduction number Rt ("ar tee"), which is the number of cases generated in the current state of a population, which does not have to be the uninfected state.
The lower the R value the better. An R value below one is considered good.
When the R value is greater than one, the number of infected people increases.
When the R value is smaller than one, the number of infected people decreases.
When the R value is equal to one, the number of infected people remains constant.
R values are hard to determine and I therefore consider it the least accurate of all values presented in my blog. I suspect that R values cannot easily be compared between regions or countries and thus only the change (does it go up or down?) and whether it is above or below one is of real importance.
This number tells us how many of the Coronavirus tests come back as positive. Ideally, there should be as many tests performed on one day as there are people. As an example: in a country of 1 million inhabitants with 10 infected persons, you would expect 10 positive tests if you were to test the entire population, which thus results in a test-positive rate of 0.001%. But that would require to perform 10 million tests on each day.
Of course, such a large number of tests is cost-prohibitive and not really feasible. Therefore countries and regions perform as many tests as their budget and/or their infrastructure allows. Most countries started with only testing people with symptoms, which resulted in a very high number of positive test results (20% or more). As countries started to expand their testing to the population without symptoms, the test-positive rate fell.
According to criteria published by WHO in May 2020, a positive rate of less than 5% is one indicator that the epidemic is under control in a country. This is also one of the WHO's criteria for re-opening after lockdown.
If this daily positive test number goes up, it is a sign that the testing cannot keep up with the number of newly infected. If the number goes down, it means the opposite, and this is actually good.
With home testing having become mainstream and data thus no longer transmitted to the health authorities, this number (together with testing data) has become useless and I took it off the blog as of 13 May 2023.