It is much more sensible to compare how many people have tested positive for Covid-19 this week to last week.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize surely does not relish putting out the daily numbers for Covid-19 infection and death counts. To sweeten the bitter pill, the daily press release traditionally ends by reporting both “deaths and recoveries”, and from here flow headlines about the “recovery rate”. The steadily creeping upwards recovery rate, typically the last number in the update, flickers like a glimmer of light at the end of our Covid-19 tunnel.
There are a number of ways of being a bit more sophisticated. These attempts have led to estimates of a case fatality rate of about 1 to 2% in South Africa. This is controversial, much higher than we would like, nothing like Ebola, and much lower than many other well-known illnesses. So how do we interpret the older observations that the recovery rate was about 50%, and that now it is closer to 80%; and what kind of recovery rate should we feel good about?
The details of how this fraction of “still open” cases gradually winds down over weeks, months and years are very complicated, and it is very unclear how we should relate to it viscerally – like we can to a case fatality rate. A one in 50 chance of death, given an illness, is easy to compare to a one in five chance of death – and it prompts very different levels of caution to avoid infection.
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