Epidemic Model Update

One death today, but the momentum in increased testing 14 days ago is being felt, so undetected infected numbers are still falling.

We would like to share that in addition to the infected numbers, we also monitor two metrics which tell us whether our model is accurate, and getting more accurate or less.

One is the current mortality rate as reported by the Ministry of Health (MOH), which is simply deaths / total cumulative infected. That figure as of today is 99/5820 which is 1.7%. The mortality rate 14 days ago as reported by MOH was 77/2626 which is 2.9%.

We highlight this because our model’s mortality rate, a crucial number which underpins our extrapolation, is currently 1.63%. It is a composite of countries who have had earlier experience dealing with Covid-19 (sometimes as little as a matter of weeks more than Malaysia!) and who similarly did not have their health care systems overwhelmed.

We view Malaysia’s mortality rate approaching our model’s rate as a sign of its overall accuracy. However, the surge in detected cases in Singapore without new deaths is going to need explanation soon. Singapore’s mortality rate has plummeted to 12/14,423 or 0.08%!

This data point is definitely something to watch and signals something we don’t know yet about Covid-19 and SARS-CoV-2.

The other metric we monitor for the accuracy of our model is the undetected asymptomatic/presymptomatic rate of total infected, but we will save a discussion on that for another day.

As always our model is available to view here.