One of the complaints I have about the way Covid-19 health statistics are reported on the news is that they always report the totals. It makes for mighty big numbers and sounds scary. (I’m not saying Covid isn’t scary.) For example, on the day I write this, there are over 1.5 million cases in the U.S. That number is NEVER going down, barring a realization that there was some data-collection error. It’s a cumulative total. Thus, 20 years from now the total number of Covid cases will not be less than 1.5 million, even if the case rate permanently drops to zero (which it won’t).
I think a much more useful piece of information is the number of new cases per day. For example, today, May 23, there were 24,268. That’s still a big number, but we have hope of bringing it down.
Actually, I think a more informative number still is the number of new deaths. There are several ways to count new cases, and better testing will undoubtedly cause an increase in case numbers.
I started collecting my own summary of daily statistics, just so I could make sense in my own mind of what’s going on. Initially I just did it on my home computer, but recently I decided to upload the results to my web site. You can find it here. When I started uploading it, I started writing a summary, which also helps me look at and understand the numbers. I try to update it every day at 5 pm, but it is a manual process, and I’m also dependent on the producers of the statistics to post on time.
Whenever I hear a newscaster quote some shocking Covid statistic, I wish could yell at the reporter and say “yes, but what is today’s number??”