Premier "Satisfaction" and "Handling Coronavirus Performance" - Newpoll, page-36

"They, the MSM, are starting to talk about rising cases but can't work out why nobody's dying. They are seeing this data but not understanding it and probably never will."

Despite it being the metric quoted ad nauseum by the media and being the metric which statistically innumerate bureaucrats reference when they are "taking action" or "doing something", the number of cases" is a near-meaningless measure of anything, for two principle reasons:

1. The number of cases provide no insight whatsoever into the actual number of infections.
(If the number of infections was not materially different to the number of reported cases, this would not be a problem but sero-prevalence data now emerging points to the number of infections being several orders of magnitude higher than the case numbers, which makes the case figure a useful media sound bite, but it is rather meaningless when it comes to managing the pandemic based on the parameter that matters, namely the Infection Mortality Rate.) [*]

2. Testing regimes are totally different today than they were in March/April when the virus first arrived in various countries. Just the sheer testing capacity (number of testing sites, turnaround times, testing procedures) is today probably 10 times what it was in March/April. Not just that, but the personal propensity for people to be tested today is a lot higher than it was 4 or 5 months ago.


[*] Which makes easing a lockdown based on the number of reported cases falling below a certain level largely farcical, because there could still be many hundreds of infections in circulation.

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