this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 23/5/2024 (self.newzealand)
submitted 6 months ago by Dave to c/newzealand
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that doesn’t justify a full post. For example:

  • Something interesting that happened to you
  • Something humourous that happened to you
  • Something frustrating that happened to you
  • A quick question
  • A request for recommendations
  • Pictures of your pet
  • A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like a hippo
  • Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

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[–] BalpeenHammer 4 points 6 months ago (7 children)

How come nobody is reporting on covid anymore? From what I understand there has been a serious spike in cases over the last couple of weeks.

[–] Dave 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

It's probably not news anymore. No one is reading articles about it, so they don't publish the stories.

In Wellington there's this flu study that also tracks COVID, but they have only just started tracking the 2024 flu season. Still, there's a substantial number of COVID cases. In the past the most recent week has always been inaccurate as they are still waiting for the results of some testing to come through, so ignore that as it's probably not actually a drop (based on the other axis we should see it higher than the first week's results).

graph of flu tracking as described above. Graph has two weeks of data with the second one incomplete, and shows the breakdown of virus. COVID is the largest one but there is also Influenza A, Rhinovirus, and RSV in decent amounts. Graph also has another axis showing the rate of reported illness of study participants and the confirmed rate of illness (after testing). Both have increased from the first to the second week

[–] BalpeenHammer 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Given the lack of rigorous testing and monitoring I suspect actual reported number of cases should be doubled or tripled. The hospitalisation and deaths are more reliable and that's what we should be monitoring.

[–] Dave 3 points 6 months ago

In terms of MOH reporting, absolutely. Triple is probably still underestimating. You're right about hospitalisations and deaths, data is much better when we don't rely on people self-reporting. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find the right data (though I didn't try particularly hard).

The graph I posted about is from a flu study, the numbers should be very reliable, just affected by the small sample size (from my rough calculations based on the graph, about 1,300 participants). From the graph it looks like about 20/80 confirmed cases, so 20/1300. With a very rough 400,000 people in the Wellington region, that's 6,000 people with COVID in Wellington alone.

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