In the Dark

I’ve been continuing my attempts to keep track of the daily Covid-19 statistics in Ireland over on the page here although it’s getting very confusing with various changes in testing practice, retrospective reclassifications and general complexity of the reporting process.

This cartoon from the latest Private Eye pretty much sums up the situation:

Nevertheless, here is the latest plot

This shows that the progress of the disease is fairly flat but there is no evidence from these data of a significant downward trend in the daily figures.

Here’s a different visualisation in which I plot the daily figures against the cumulative total. You might be interested in this variation in which I plot the daily numbers against the cumulative total. Since this is approximately a graph of the derivative of a function plotted against the function itself, exponential growth would look like a straight line in this figure.

Apart from the (substantial) statistical noise you can see only a slight indication of the curves starting to depart from linearity.

The current restrictions on movement and gatherings are in place until May 5th but on the basis of the figures available to the public I wouldn’t bet against them being extended.

This entry was posted on April 26, 2020 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Covid-19, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.