Economy 22 December 2020, 9:03am

COVID-19: Low number of daily cases, lots of deaths

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Hungarian authorities diagnosed 1,238 people with coronavirus (COVID-19) infection over the past 24 hours, taking the total to number of infections to 306,368 in the country. 180 people have died in coronavirus-related diseases, mostly elderly citizens with chronic diseases. The death toll is up at 8,462, while 108,676 patients have recovered from the virus The number of active cases is down by 4,656 at 189,230. Budapest accounts for 18% of active cases, 20% of deaths and 21% of those that recovered. There are 7,124 coronavirus patients in hospital (up 27 d/d), with 522 of them on ventilators (up 5 d/d).

At 1,238 the number of new daily confirmed COVID-19 cases is the lowest we have seen since October, but there's a huge volatility in these numbers and we wouldn't be surprised to see a number thousands higher than this in the following days. The descending trend is promising, though.

What's a lot more tragic is that the number of coronavirus-related deaths would not drop despite a decline in the number of new daily cases. In respect of yesterday's report we have remarked that there could be several reasons behind this phenomenon but due to the unreliability of official data (by the Operational Corps) we can make educated guesses at best. It is evident that there's a major excess mortality in Hungary (e.g. 52% more people died in November than in the same month of 2019). While this does not mean that all of them died of coronavirus-related diseases and authorities deliberately failed to register them as COVID-19 fatalities, it is certainly a high possibility that many of them were infected but never showed up in the system as such. Another reason could be that an increasing number of elderly people contract the virus, we simply don't know. The descending trend observed at new daily cases should sooner or later be reflected in the number of deaths too.

The number of coronavirus patients hospitalised and those on ventilators has risen but we should look at the trend instead of the day-to-day changes.

The low number of new daily cases has to do with the low number of tests performed. Over the past 24 hours, authorities tested only 8,000 samples, a lot fewer than in the preceding days. As you can see, the number of tests per day has been constantly dropping for a couple of days now.

This does not automatically imply underdetection, though. Authorities may be testing less because the number of suspicious cases is dropping (i.e. the spread of the virus is decelerating). The percentage of positive tests underpins this assumption. Although there was a slight uptick over the previous day's figure, the descending trend of the last few weeks continued even at a decreasing number of tests performed. Unfortunately, other key data (number of people in hospital, and deaths) do not show a significant decrease, but these track the drop in new daily cases with a delay, and as the health care system is under immense pressure, the official figures do not necessarily reflect reality.