Business 31 May 2021, 9:28am

COVID-19 in Hungary: 156 new cases, 5 fatalities

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Hungarian authorities confirmed 156 new coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the past 24 hours, and there were 5 fatalities, the official government website said. The number of vaccinated people reached 5,146,949, of whom 3,611,690 have received both jabs by Monday morning.

There were just 156 new cases confirmed yesterday in Hungary, the lowest since 1 September 2020. It should be noted that Monday and Tuesday data are subject to the weekend effect and are typically lower, and last Monday’s case number was below 200 as well. The seven-day rolling average continues to decrease, indicating that the pandemic is receding.

The total number of coronavirus cases in Hungary since the outbreak began last March is 804,538.

There were 5 fatalities yesterday, which means the death toll rose to 29,733. The last time fatalities were in the single digits was also last September.

There are currently 981 coronavirus patients in hospital, with 110 of them on ventilator.

Over the past two weeks, the number of people with coronavirus infection in Hungarian hospitals and of those requiring mechanical ventilation dropped by 57%, and the decrease over a month ago was over 83%. This is shown on the left-hand chart below. The problem is that both numbers have started to stagnate.

The right-hand chart, however, shows that only 1.3% of active cases are in hospital, as opposed to 2.2% on 1 May and as high as 6.5-6.7% in March, while over 11% of them are still on ventilators.

The index has been steadily around 12% for a while now and while there are now slightly fewer than 1,000 people with coronavirus infection in hospitals and this ratio is largely the same when there were over 12,000!

Authorities applied 8,052 COVID tests yesterday, which means the positivity rate was under 2%. The average positivity rate in the past seven days was 2.7%.

Here are a few more charts on Hungary's testing practices. As hospitals keep discharging COVID-19 patients who are not in a life-threatening situation in a bid to return to business as usual, tests are done only on those with severe symptons and those awaiting to be discharged (and therefore are presumably negative).

The number of tests remains low, while the number of active cases keeps dropping and the number of COVID-19 patients registered as recovered keeps rising (presumably as GPs are catching up with their paperwork).

The charts below show that the fewer tests authorities perform, the higher the number of recovered people goes and the lower the number of active cases goes.

The overlap on the first chart starting in end-March, early April (the number of active cases dropping and the number of recovered people going up) was caused mainly by GPs registering people with COVID-19 as recovered. Also, the higher the number of COVID-19 go, the more overlapping these ’ridges’ will become, because they are no longer in the log of active cases but they are (obviously) not in recovered status either.

And here's the same with 7-day rolling averages.

The following two charts show the same set of figures, only the yellow area on the one on the right, depicting the number of people that recovered from COVID-19, is from top to bottom.

The trend on the right-hand chart is clear: the more tests they perform (blue), the lower the number of recoveries go (yellow). The same phenomenon can be seen on the first chart, by the way, only in the form of ‘ridges’ running parallel with each other up to April. Then there’s a sharp divergence. One of the ridges becomes a precipice, the other turns into a steeply ascending cliff.

This abrupt change is shown on the third chart by the yellow line skyrocketing to over 58% from 5% over less than 1.5 months. Our hypothesis is that most of the daily tests are done on samples taken from people waiting to be discharged from hospitals, while authorities are also trying to perform as few tests as possible, i.e. only those that show severe symptoms get tested for COVID-19. There was a sharp drop in the index showing the 7-day rolling average of recoveries/daily tests on 21 May.

In order to show the latest more clearly, here's a chart that spans from 1 April to 30 May.

The number of people vaccinated is 5,146,949, of whom 3,611,690 have already received both doses. Vaccination coverage in Hungary is now 53%, compared to the EU’s average of 37%. Currently available vaccines include Pfizer, Sinopharm, limited amounts of Sputnik, and also Moderna at some vaccination centres, the government website said.

Finally, another interesting fact: There are about 75,000 active COVID-19 cases currently (the 7-day average is slightly over 87,000) with about 980 people in hospital with coronavirus infection, and about 9,700 in mandatory quarantine. 70,000 – 980 – 9,700 = 59,320. Where are the other active cases? About 50,000 to 55,000 people with coronavirus infection are potentially walking among us in the streets. Unless they chose to stay indoors at home. But officially they do not have to do so.