Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Friday, March 20, 2020

End Of Week Muhan Math

The Telegraph posted an article on the ranges in infections and deaths for different countries. It contained the following chart (which of course will change after this posting):

I did some math against these numbers and found the following:

1) The Mean is: 1116 deaths.
The Standard Deviation is: 1262
The Margin of Error is: 420.5
Variance: 1,592,094

As you can see only China and Italy has deaths above the mean and 2 Standard Deviations from the mean. Mathematically we would consider these two cases to be outlier data that is to be considered suspect. Similarly Germany and South Korea would be considered outliers even though they are well within 1SD of the mean. The math suggests that Spain, France and Iran may be the most likely outcome. Realize with a variance as high as 1.6 million we could still see "large" numbers of deaths. I put large in quotes because next to the world population of 7.8 billion, 1.6 million is not all that much. That may sound cold but that's the numbers.

Other things of note in that article:

But there are other factors that may have contributed to Italy’s fatality rates, experts say. This includes a high rate of smoking and pollution - the majority of deaths have been in the northern region Lombardy region, which is notorious for poor air quality.
Also
But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities. “The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity - many had two or three,” he says.