The press release and starting the blog.
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| Coronavirus cases - South Korea vs Australia Source: Johns Hopkins and Australian Department of Health |
1 April 2020.
I stayed up till 4:30 am early this morning preparing a press release as follows
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PRESS RELEASE
AUSTRALIA BRINGS
COVID-19 UNDER CONTROL
Australia has become the first
Western-style democracy to bring Covid-19 under control, says Dr Joe Flood, a
former CSIRO Principal Research Scientist and mathematician.
“It was already likely by last Friday (28
March) that the exponential growth in cases had stabilised”, said Dr Flood, who
has worked with global agencies on social indicators for many years. “Since
then the number of cases has followed the trajectory of South Korea fairly
closely and has fallen away right on cue. For five days new cases were steady
at around 360, and then they fell to 200 and 100, around a half and a quarter
of the high value, as in Korea.”
“If Australia remains vigilant, new cases should
now remain fairly steady at around 100 per day and then fall away. Daily hospitalizations and
deaths will increase for a while, but I expect the total number of deaths
during this outbreak to be less than 120.”
The other two countries that have stabilised
the disease after it became entrenched in the population are China and South
Korea. China has been successful in eliminating new cases by employing extreme
authoritarian measures to isolate infected populations.
South Korea, which has about double
Australia’s population, had extensive experience in dealing with the MERS coronavirus
in 2015. This time they embarked on the world’s largest testing program,
identifying cases and tracking them through cellphones and credit cards, and
publishing the de-identified results on GIS and social media. The authorities have
continued to locate and isolate clusters of outbreaks as their major priority.
Australia has achieved a similar result by
conducting the second-largest testing and isolation program (per capita) of any
country. It has also promptly laid down and enforced social distancing measures
with the co-operation of the public, without resorting to intrusive high-tech
tracking or authoritarian measures.
We compliment the Australian Federal and
State governments on this outstanding success in a situation of unprecedented pressure,
while cautioning that social distancing will need to be maintained for some
time to prevent further outbreaks.
This claim could well be premature, but I was assessing the climate. It was not unreasonable given the pattern of new cases you can see in the chart.
I put the press release myself and also through an agency and waited for responses. I have been mobbed by the media in the past with much less sensational claims, but this was a very different environment.
However I received a nil response from the media or anyone else. Zero.
The press agent thought the press release was not controversial enough for the press and too much in agreement with the government, the media thrive on conflict. After some thought I replied,
I don’t think it is as you say, on this occasion. All bets are off. Everyone is so scared at the moment they don’t need to dig up sensationalist rubbish, it is all there in real life. In this environment, nobody wants to be seen as promoting possible ‘fake news’ – or early estimations such as my own. They are waiting only for official sources. Even reputable policy sources aren't getting much coverage.
Not having another platform, I have therefore started up a blog - so I can go on the record as I complete my analysis.
NOTE (15 July) It has turned out the original prediction of 31 March was correct, Australia's top or inflection point of cases was precisely as indicated on that chart. I deliberately over-called the number of deaths to provide a margin of error, and actually thought it would be well under 100. Australia currently has 62 deaths and there will be a few more in this wave.
The pattern recognition match against South Korea needs to be adjusted as follows.
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| South Korea and Australia, confirmed coronavirus cases across the peak |
In both countries, the inflection point occurred around the same time after 9 days of advance, and rounding off took 9-10 days, after which cases fell to a low background level after a further 9-10 days.
The Wuhan epidemic followed a fairly similar path, though the data are necessarily not as accurate.
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