Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
I don’t know unless they’re suppressing thousands of cases that figure is fairly standalone, unless you think they’re just not testing but on a per 100k basis that’s been shown to be the opposite they are testing more than us.
“A like for like basis” is a convenient straw for some to clutch to in order to avoid unfavourable comparisons. Seph has drawn us towards a very interesting observation here that shouldn’t be easily dismissed. There could be something useful to learn from comparisons, but there of course has to be a willingness and not just a belief grounded on quicksand that we must be the best in the world.
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Yes but it's correct that you have to understand how your figure is measured.
If you look, for example, at a common quoted official death metric for a covid-19 death, it's simply counted as a death within 28 days of a positive test; the implication that this is significant time to count the death as due to covid is likely in a lot of cases. What it could also potentially include is someone who tested positive with mild symptoms, recovered within a week but then died in a car accident or something within 28 days, presumably that would still count on the official figures. But you do have to have a metric which can be measured consistently and doesn't depend on a more objective view of someone who has processed the paperwork, where in some cases, it's difficult to say whether covid has contributed to the death significantly or not.
Given that different countries have different measuring criteria you need to look at what they are actually measuring and how they are measuring it. The Austria comparison is interesting if they are doing more tests but maybe we are targeting them better. If for example they are just slinging tests at everyone and expecting them to do this twice a week and record it, which is registering a high number of tests which are unlikely to come back positive, as opposed to targeting testing capacity at unvaccinated school kids who are highly likely to have it and likely with mild or no symptoms. Or if they are counting LFTs and/or PCRs and what cycle they run at.
The observation is interesting because they have, superficially at least, higher testing capacity and a similar vaccination rate but are still registering fewer new cases and fewer deaths/people in hospital. But even those figures aren't necessarily measuring the same thing everywhere. Whereas you'd be clear that say looking at figures from London or Manchester are likely to be using the same testing basis.