WHEN it comes to the daily statistics coming out of Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) it has been hard to be optimistic.

Any optimism has to be respectful of the 183 people who have lost their lives and the grieving families and friends they have left behind.

It is frustrating that the government in this country cannot provide recovery rates. We continue to ask.

We are grateful that the PAH press team have been able to provide stories of people who have recovered.

But for now we keep our eye on the daily figures and try and look for any positive signs.

There was a dreadful couple of days (April 14th-14 deaths and April 15th-9 deaths)

There has not been days like it since.

Here are the figures over the last three weeks.

From March 18th to April 8th there had been 90 deaths.

Then..

The totals below are cumulative figures for the whole period since March 18th.

April 9th: 100 deaths
April 10th: 105 deaths
April 11th: 110 deaths
April 12th: 117 deaths
April 13th: 118 deaths
April 14th: 132 deaths
April 15th: 141 deaths
April 16th: 146 deaths
April 17th: 150 deaths
April 18th: 155 deaths.
April 19th: 159 deaths
April 20th: 169 deaths
April 21st: 174 deaths
April 22nd: 175 deaths
April 23rd: 180 deaths
April 24th: 182 deaths
April 25th: 183 deaths

Having referred to those two very bad days, there was also a bad day on Monday April 20th when there were ten deaths.

Since then, there has been increases of 5, 1, 5, 2 and 1. Allied to that is Tuesday April 21st when there were no deaths. Why that is important is that many days start at zero but then sadly, adjustments are made. For example, Thursday April 16th started at zero but was adjusted to 3,4,5 and 6. Tuesday April 21st was the first day since March 17th when there was and has not been any deaths recorded.

When we first wrote this report on April 19th, we thought we might be clutching at straws. We would like to think that this is evidence that things are becoming better.

If you are on Twitter, then we would recommend that you follow Prof.Karl Sikora who

His two tweets today read

“Fewest number of deaths reported for this month today at 413 vs the last 3 Sundays – 596, 737, 621.

Don’t focus on the daily figures (good or bad), look to the trends.

The peak is behind us.

“Work to do, but we are finally seeing significant progress on the mortality trend”.