Tag: Belgium

Calculating the real number of infections from Covid-19 on some European Countries on June 1st.

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Obtaining the Infection Fatality Rate On the past two weeks two most important studies were made public. One from the Public Health Agency of Sweden1 reporting the calculated real infection fatality rate of Covid-19 in Stockholm, and another from the MIT2 . Both having the same goal: estimating the real infection fatality rate (IFR). This corresponds to the odds of dying from the disease, including those who have mild or no symptoms. How does this differ from the values reported by official figures? Official figures only include the number of people having been tested positive. And people without symptoms, nor with a known contact with another person having tested positive, don’t often get tested, unless it gets into a random population study. With this in mind, the ratio you get with the current figures is known as Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which corresponds to the number of fatalities based on the number of known infections. Knowing the number of how many people went undetected is what allows you to calculate the most import indicator of a pandemic disease: the actual fatality rate. Countries with the lowest CFR puts it at around 3.9%, such as Czechia, where others, such as Italy or Belgium exceeds 10%. …

Belgium is now the world’s most affected country by Covid-19 (except for Andorra and San Marino)

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Something is very wrong in Belgium. It’s known that Belgium reacted a bit slow to the Covid-19 pandemic, and only entered lock down on March 18th, after 18 people had already died and the number of infected exceeded 1000 people. Nevertheless, 29 days have passed, and things seemed not to have worked, as the following chart depicts: After the initial lockdown, everything seemed to work inline with other countries such as France, UK or the Netherlands. Not that those countries fared extremely well, but were not at the levels of Italy or Spain. Then, around April 9th ( or around March 21st, the date 20 days earlier) something went very wrong. The number of fatalities started to skyrocket. And has continued ever since. From 15 fatalities per 100 000 to 42 fatalities, exceeding those of Italy or Spain, and becoming the world’s most affected country by Covid-19, and the curve is nowhere near becoming flat. This demonstrates that announcing a lockdown is different that enforcing a lockdown. Let’s compare Google’s data from Belgium with other (now) less affected countries, such as Spain. Spain Belgium So, Spain’s lockdown was more strictly implemented than Belgium’s, and not that the figures from Spain are anything …

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