Article confuses new deaths with new positives. The deaths are not as importat as the positives. They represent week or more old cases. If Italy can see a continued fall in new positives over the next few days that might bea sign.
It’s the Daily Sun with the page 3 girls. Don’t expect them to know anything.
Actually new deaths or symptomatic cases are the the things to watch because the new testings only show the disease prevalence. There are many more disease covid negatives than covid positives and many more who may have been positive will never have been tested. Abrupt changes in the numbers needing hospital care tells us if the disease is expanding and drops seen over time show us that prevalence is dropping.. All the numbers are lagging numbers 3-14 days from catching to becoming ill with another 2-3 weaks to get over it while being contagious to others. But lagging numbers are what we are stuck with.
If the numbers of dead and newly acutely sick are starting to drop in Italy that means fewer were starting to catch it 3-14 days ago which means quarantine efforts are helping (or the disease has hit a rock in terms of those hearty souls who never would have gotten the disease at all.) and that there are less actually catching the disease now who will end up being symptomatic in the next week to 14 days.
That also means that if there are less catching the disease now who later become symptomatic(who then test positive at that point), there will be less numbers who end up needing to be hospitalized.(and then there will be less who will die...and so on until the disease prevalence(per million) spirals into nothingness).
All the numbers always lag from contraction of the disease to symptoms unless we were to invent time machines that can go back in time to see when each sufferer got the disease...
If you dramatically increase testing of the general populace now who are not symptomatic, you may catch a lot of folks with it but still many false negatives. You don’t know how many people who had it a week ago since many folks weren’t tested then and probably won’t be tested now.
Testing now only helps with diagnosis when one is actually sick or there is a question of exposure. Once we know...the protocols will then need to be followed.
Look for rises or falls of the sick or dead in terms of numbers coming into the hospitals. Look for the percentages of the dead to fall as a function of the rising numbers of completed cases(cases closed that had a determination of either recovery or death) A drop in the deaths against the rise of the recovered as determined from resolved cases tells you more if the disease is subsiding.
“but still many false negatives”
I meant to say “but still many negatives”...sorry I didn’t catch that!