In Wellington there's this flu study that also tracks COVID, but they have only just started tracking the 2024 flu season. Still, there's a substantial number of COVID cases. In the past the most recent week has always been inaccurate as they are still waiting for the results of some testing to come through, so ignore that as it's probably not actually a drop (based on the other axis we should see it higher than the first week's results).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Given the lack of rigorous testing and monitoring I suspect actual reported number of cases should be doubled or tripled. The hospitalisation and deaths are more reliable and that's what we should be monitoring.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

In terms of MOH reporting, absolutely. Triple is probably still underestimating. You're right about hospitalisations and deaths, data is much better when we don't rely on people self-reporting. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find the right data (though I didn't try particularly hard).

The graph I posted about is from a flu study, the numbers should be very reliable, just affected by the small sample size (from my rough calculations based on the graph, about 1,300 participants). From the graph it looks like about 20/80 confirmed cases, so 20/1300. With a very rough 400,000 people in the Wellington region, that's 6,000 people with COVID in Wellington alone.