Carlos Fonseca Terán, Cuaderno Sandinista, June 15th 2020
https://cuadernosandinista.com/2020/06/15/nicaragua-estadisticas-tenden…
Editor's note: In an effort to malign and discredit Nicaragua’s health system, medical professionals aligned with Nicaragua's pro-regime change political opposition are using phony “parallel” statistics to claim there are more cases and more deaths from COVID-19 in Nicaragua than those officially reported by the Health Ministry. This article by Carlos Fonseca Terán exposes the falsity of those claims.
The pandemic coup and its prophets of the apocalypse announced in April that by May 10 there would be 238,000 people infected and 23,000 dead from COVID19 in Nicaragua.
Today is June 15, and from their "Observatory" they claim that there are 4,971 infections and 1,289 deaths from COVID19. How can we believe them?
However, even if their figures were true, we would have a mortality rate of 20.29 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, while the country that serves as their model, the United States, has a rate of 35.39, and developed countries like Spain and Italy have 57.33 and 56.73, respectively.
According to our government's latest report on June 9, we have so far had 1,661 positive cases, of whom 1238 have recovered, 359 are currently active and 64 have died, giving a mortality rate of 0.87 per 100,000 population. The global rate is 5.43.
In the last two weeks there has been a sustained decrease in new cases of infection and new deaths, indicating that the statistical peak in both indicators occurred in the week of May 19-26. Since then, the curve of infections and deaths began to decline and therefore, the pandemic began to be reversed.
Let's see:
May 19th: 254 new cases. / 9 new deaths.
May 26: 480 new cases / 18 new deaths.
June 2: 359 new cases / 11 new deaths
June 9: 346 new cases / 9 new deaths.
It should be pointed out that the validity of this downward trend is maintained even in the case of under-registration of cases and deaths, which is a common phenomenon in any country during a pandemic, due to the difficulty of knowing for sure the exact number of infections, especially in this current pandemic given the large number of asymptomatic cases.
Knowing the number of infections need not be a priority for certain models of confronting the pandemic. The number of deaths is a much more reliable indicator, especially in our case, where one criterion for the application of the tests is whether the person belongs to the population at risk.
But the number of inhabitants is the most reliable statistic. So, as we have said, the correct variable for measuring the intensity of the pandemic and the effectiveness of the measures to control it, is mortality, not lethality, since mortality takes as its point of reference the total population. While the point of reference for lethality is the total number of infections which is always indeterminate, although because it may rise or fall it is useful for evaluating what stage the pandemic has reached. However, the number of deaths only increases, which makes it necessary to relate the mortality rate to the periods before and after the peak of deaths (either per day or, in our case, per week).
In other words, the mortality rate is useful in relation to the moment the pandemic has reached that number of deaths, and for comparison either to the global mortality rate or to the mortality rate in other countries.
The falsity of the opposition's so called “parallel count” of the pandemic is revealed when it claims that the number of deaths reached half its current number shortly after the weekly mortality rate peaked. This is absurd, because following the statistical peak in the number of deaths, the rate of increase in mortality declines over the same period of time compared to the rate at which it previously increased.
This means that half of the mortality rate must occur before the peak in the number of deaths because the mortality rate rises in line with the total number of deaths. This leads the political opposition's “parallel count” to contradict not just the official figures, but even the actual trend of the indicators, which is a much more objective statistic.
In other words, in their desperation, the prophets of the apocalypse had to increase their count of infections and deaths in a particularly arbitrary way so as to include not just those that took place during the lapse of time since the statistical peak in the week of May 19-26, but even those from last week.
So, mathematics, that great ally of truth, implacable and impossible to circumvent, shows the situation as it really is. This means two things: Firstly, that our model of addressing the pandemic works, and secondly, that the lies of the Covid coup become less and less plausible with every passing day.
But these two things in turn, mean a third, namely that we will continue to overcome all the viruses that come our way: the natural organic ones represented by the Coronavirus, and the spiritual ones of human misery, represented by the pandemic coup.
Translation by Nan McCurdy and Stephen Sefton