RE:COVID - What's Under the Hood?Bang on, on so many fronts. You can make statistics from the numbers you have available, but if you don't have all of the numbers your stats mean diddly. Just got home from whistler, big delays going through yyz. All the flights were delayed. Official reason was weather (somewhat plausible given the cold in the west). Poked a few of the many flight crew roaming around, and it was crew availability. Unlike the US, AC was not advertising the obvious. Not great for bookings, eh? Got home to find out that 3 families in the immediate vicinity were quarantining for Xmas. Eleven people, 10 to 55 years old. Only one from each house went in to get tested. All had relatively minor flu symptoms. How's that for an underrepresentation of testing and positivity stats? Alas, there will be a wave of temporary closures as this plays through. My biggest concern is when they will do away with post flight testing. This will become a huge problem for the travel industry until solved, and is the reason I would encourage some extra thought on these recovery stocks. They may not be just there yet. GLTA, get some chicken soup for the pantry.
Experienced wrote: We are all being inundated with statistics and media hype about COVID, but what are the takeaways and reliability of the numbers and the implications?
Reliability of the numbers
From the US CDC....
Rapid tests -
if you are symptomatic and get a positive result 99% of the time you got COVID
If you get a negative result and are symptomatic the test is wrong 64% of the time.
If you get a negative result and are a symptomstic the test is wrong 34% of the time.
Takeaway?
Rapid tests reliably tell you what you already know - you are sick!! Otherwise they are basically useless.
Case Counts
They underestimate the actual number since many people are asymptomatic or simply don't report to their local health unit that the are sick.
Takeaway?
Case counts are useless
How bad is Omnicron?
I live in a large metropolitan area. We have had record (reported) case counts (about 10X from before) for the last couple of weeks. Hospitalizations? Lower than before with Delta. In the US over the past week case counts are up 75% and the number of people in hospital is up 7%. If the true number of cases was actually known then this ratio would be a lot less.
Economic Implications?
With rapid increase in numbers of cases reported and unreported combined with the quantine guidelines we are rapidly moving to a situation where there will be nobody left who can work. We have already seen this in the US over the thousands of flight cancellations.
If this continues there will some not so pleasant economic numbers coming out which will affect stock prices.
What should we do?
Clearly "following the science" so far hasn't worked. Perhaps it is time to have a rethink about this and get some people in with some fresh ideas and more importantly, some Common Sense.