Every week we take a look at the more positive aspects of the coronavirus development in Luxembourg. This week is looking particularly good.
The daily focus in media - ours and others - naturally lies on how many new cases have been confirmed, how many deaths, and how the government is responding to the developments of the outbreak here in Luxembourg. It is easy to see this data and think that the situation now is quite similar to how it has been over the past few weeks, even months - but thankfully that is not the case.
We have actually seen some rather positive developments over the past week - which is also reflected in the government's decision to lift some of the lockdown measures. Let's take a look at the data and see where we're at, and what's happened over the last few days.
Weekly cases down
Let's start by looking at the number of cases confirmed in a 7-day period. What the chart below shows is the number of confirmed cases in a given week, running from Saturday until the next Friday because the first case was confirmed on the 29th of February, a Saturday.
As you can see, the number of new cases confirmed cases peaked in the 7-day period between 21 and 27 March, at 1,121 confirmed cases reported by the government. This has been followed by a steady drop in the three subsequent weeks, and in the last 7-day period (ending 17 April) we saw just 257 new confirmed cases.
In the week following peak-week, we saw a 10.5% drop, then a drop of 39.1%, and in this last week a further drop of 58% in terms of new confirmed cases compared to the previous 7-day period.
Weekly cases down
The sceptical reader may question whether this is simply down to fewer tests being carried out - which could of course explain it, but this is not the case.
Number of tests
The government only started sharing data on the exact number of tests carried out each day on 31 March, so we can't do a full week-by-week comparison in line with the above. What we can do is look at how many tests have been carried out each day since they started sharing the data, and what percentage of these returned a positive result.
As you can see, there were indeed a few days where fewer tests were carried out (notably over the Easter weekend). However, more interesting is to look at the proportion of tests that returned a positive result - that is to say, the person tested was found to carry the virus. With one notable outlier on 10 March, this number has been trending downward quite steadily.
If we look at the total number of tests done and infections confirmed since the start of the outbreak, 10.6% of tests have returned a positive result. If we look at the last 7 days (12-18 April), this figure stands at a considerably lower 6.4%.
Tests
Discharged vs hospitalised
The final thing thing we'll look at is the number of people who are currently hospitalised, and the number of discharged. As you can see from the below, the number of COVID-19 patients who have been discharged from hospital is growing steadily, while the number currently hospitalised is showing a downward trajectory.
