In the world of statistics, momentous days sometimes come without announcing themselves. Not for us, we will let you know when it happens.

Today we start saying with clarity whether an MCO can end tomorrow. And we do that by introducing a new data point: detections within the last 14 days. Check it out at the bottom of our pic below.

Let’s back up a bit. We update every day a 14-day lag model of what we think was the infected population in Malaysia 14 days ago, using mortality data. Then we minus off the dead, recovered and detected new cases to find the undetected numbers of infected people “out there”.

Our model estimates there were 1,167 undetected infected (let’s call them UI’s abbreviated) 14 days ago, or T-14 (T being today). However, we can also see that in the period from T-14 (from 17 April 2020 to today, 30 April 2020), the UI population was reduced by a total of 820, through detections.

The day that this cumulative total of 14 day UI reductions surpasses the T-14 UI total will be the day that there MAY be zero UI’s out there. That means what we detect, is how many SARS-Cov-2 infected people there are in Malaysia. That is, what is detected is also what the true population of infected is.

Is it likely? Maybe not. But it will be possible.

That does not mean the epidemic is over, it just means that the number of cases out there reported is (or is extremely close to) the actual number of cases out there. Very important for our economy to move forward.

We now change our update to report this new 14 day cumulative total of UI reductions, instead of the undetected rate. As always, our model can be viewed in full here: