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With Thailand’s outbreak stuck with an R hovering above 1.0, stubbornly refusing to decline, I went looking for more uplifting numbers. Our cumulative Case Fatality Rate is at least comforting! At ~0.5%, a quarter of the global 2%, and less than half of Asia’s ~1.3%. That’s good!
That means on average 1 death occurs for every 200 cases in Thailand, while globally there’s been 4 deaths for every 200 cases. We’re still failing to close off this current outbreak, but at least we’re beating the averages on keeping people alive.
Caveat: In this current outbreak it looks like Thailand’s CFR is more like 1% (~20 deaths each day and ~2000 new cases). Though that’s still half of the cumulative global average and less than Asia’s ~1.3%, so we’re still doing some things right.
Aside: Our CFR halved during the last outbreak, likely brought down by the outbreak being predominantly amongst young, healthy migrant workers. As we know, risk of death goes up dramatically with age. During this current outbreak deaths have largely been in the 40+ age bracket.
Addendum: There’s sometimes talk of Thailand’s numbers being much higher than reported, or there’s been ongoing transmission between major outbreaks - a belief based on the incorrect assumption that Thailand isn’t testing enough. Rest assured, there’s no truth to that.
Thailand’s testing has always been more than adequate, and has continued to increase over time. Thailand’s Test Positivity Rate has also been consistently low, which gives strong statistical confidence that testing is accurately capturing the scope and scale of the outbreaks.
If you’re keen to pick through the numbers yourself, OWID’s data explorer is always excellent, and is where I sourced the above graphs. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Case+fatality+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=THA~Asia~OWID_WRL
And @djay75 maintains excellent and up to date data and graphs on GitHub, with extra details such as breakdowns by province, age group, and more. https://github.com/djay/covidthailand
