Looking at the latest Covid-19 update released yesterday evening, I noticed that we have many cases who have already been tested, but who are still waiting for results.
Of those pending results are 2,884 patients under investigation, 877 close contacts and 38 with Influenza Like Illness.
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| Covid19 Msia 20200402 |
This makes a total of about 3,800 cases whose results are yet to be released.
The implication of such a situation is that the number of new Covid-19 cases published each day depends on how many of these pending results are released, and is not an actual indication of how many new cases have been discovered for that day itself.
In other words, all the daily reports of 100 to 150 new cases per day since the MCO began 17 days ago (with three spikes of 200+ on 23/3, 26/3 and 2/4), were mostly a release of historical data from the pool of pending results.
The question remains, if all the current 3,800 pending results were to be released tomorrow, how many "new cases" will we get?
