Is it possible to find the infection dates?

[honnibal]

Hi,

Thanks for the project! Like you I've been very dismayed by the state of the data being published. I don't understand why we can't just have a CSV with an event stream, with each case ID and then changes to the case.

I'm particularly troubled by the prominence of the "CFR" stat in many dashboards. This stat is near useless, due to the extremely fast growth rate. If the median time from onset to death is 22 days, and cases double every 2.75 days, then while the disease is growing 255/256 cases will be simply too recent to be "eligible" for mortality.

I want to make some more detailed calculations about this, but the problem is that we need to know the time of onset of symptoms for the cases, not simply when they were reported. The RKI figures suggest this information is often recorded, e.g. in Figure 3 here it is available for some cases: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-03-20-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

I suppose I could try to laboriously reconstruct the source figures by zooming in on the PDF, but...wtf. Is the underlying data available somewhere instead?

The public is severely misled about what's going on, because they're looking at this useless CFR figure. I think many decision makers are actually looking at the same picture of things and being misled as well.

[jgehrcke]

@honnibal Will come back this later, but a quick reply already for now.

Big thanks for the kind words Matthew and the critical thinking! Many questions arise, indeed.