Hungary COVID-19 statistics show improvement but why?
It would be absolutely amazing if the number of new daily confirmed COVID-19 cases continued to drop as they have been recently. The same goes for the number of people with coronavirus infection treated in hospital and those that can no longer breathe on their own.
However, regardless of the accuracy, reliability and transparency of official data, there’s one we need to take into consideration when interpreting the above figures or when we try to draw conclusions from them. And that’s the number of COVID-19 tests performed per day.
Just pondering here…
What if the extremely low number of tests is the reason behind the decline in the number of new daily cases? Okay, there’s the weekend impact, but still… You cannot argue with the fact that Hungary is 67th in the world in terms of tests per one million population (534,928), and 51st in terms of the number of total tests (5,157,082).
Hungary is also second in the world in respect of coronavirus-related deaths per one million people (2,653). Only Czechia (2,670) is worse, but at the current rate Hungary’s No.1 ranking is within arm’s reach, unfortunately. Czechia reported 36 new deaths today and 69 on Monday, versus Hungary’s +199 and +197, respectively.
What if the inferior testing practice causes the drop also in the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals and on ventilators?
What if what we are witnessing is an (artificial?) reduction of the number of active cases? With 13,000 tests performed, the number of active cases dropped sharply by 1,500 yesterday to 268,072 (or more likely on Sunday, because there’s probably a two-day delay in the reporting instead of one).
In order to have fewer active cases you need more and more people that recovered from COVID-19. And how do you make sure you have more tests but a declining positivity rate? Well, of course, by testing fewer people that have the infection.
That can be done two ways. Firstly, people with symptoms get tested, and it turns out that they only have the common flu, or something else but not SARS-CoV-2. Secondly, you test hospitalised coronavirus patients before discharging them to make sure they are not infectious. In that case, just to be on the safe side, one patient may be tested not once but twice. A sweeping majority, if not all, of these tests should come back negative. After all, that's why these patients are to be discharged, because they're are no longer infectious.
Do we know how many patients waiting to be discharged are tested and how many times? No, we don’t. Do we know if these are all PCR tests or the not-so-reliable antigen tests are also included in the count? No, we don’t. It’s all just speculation. That's the best we can do with the set of data we have at our disposal.
Again, this is just a ‘what if?’ scenario. Theoretical. Because the quality of the data do not let us verify any of this until we have at least mortality statistics by the Central Statistical Office (KSH). And we should not expect them, at least not for the current period, for months. And it will take even longer for the stats office to finalise mortalility statistics. We're talking about next year. And we would be astonished if final data for 2021 were to be disclosed before the parliamentary election in the spring of 2022. And by then who will care, right? The preliminary mortality data reported with weekly regularity are not going to be revised downwardly. Ever. Only up. Repeatedly.
However, it's also possible that there's absolutely no correlation between testing figures and other epidemiological statistics, we are completely delirious and the pandemic is in retreat in Hungary, so ‘by the end of May or early June we’ll be out of the woods’ and ‘Hungarians will have a free summer’. Cheers to that!
Nevertheless, here are a few charts based on official data provided by the Operational Corps. Let them speak for themselves. They are rather simple and all point to the correlation between the number of tests and everything else. Which one do you like best? Make your pick.
The following two are the same, only the top one is slightly easier on the eye, but the bottom one shows how nicely the readings fit into each other like the teeth of a saw blade.
But hey, no worries, Hungary will shortly have 3.5 million people vaccinated against COVID-19, and finally restaurants will be allowed to open their terraces. Oh, and due to economic reasons 660,000 children were ‘ordered’ back to nurseries and primary schools, while a lot of teachers could not have possibly built full protection against coronavirus, as their vaccination was not as important as of elderly people and of government officials that do not spend hours in an enclosed space with tens and hundreds of kids/adults every day.
Sorry, back to the terraces. Foreign tourists are unlikely to rush to Hungary just now, so basically all the spending will be done by locals. Every forint Hungarians will spend on a glass of beer, a cup of coffee or a hearty meal will appear in GDP but it’s money you take from the right pocket of your jeans and put in the left one. It’s the same jeans, though. Not to mention that the owners will realise that they have to raise prices so that they wouldn’t lose on the business. But this is just a side thought ahead of the next stage in the re-opening of the Hungarian economy.
