In terms of case count you’re about the same as the next 5 countries (Spain, France, Germany, Italy and the UK and about the same population!).
Well done.
You’re not even close to their combined recovered count or death toll, so that 60k would be really, really fantastic. In 2 weeks, if everybody really works at it, stays in isolation I’d expect as little as ~90,000 dead and the curve will be flattened to 1k to 1.5k dead day. Give it another 3 months and it may be under ‘control’. Gosh I hope nobody does anything really stupid and makes it worse than WW II (sorry but you’ll beat WW1 easily).
It still is exponential, but thankfully, the exponent seems to be dropping. In the US, and elsewhere in the world, too. If that drop was indeed only an artifact of limited testing, we would be f*cked - but I don’t believe the latter is the case, it might be a factor, but not exclusively.
I live in Germany and we did some, shall I say, half-assed social distancing, a lot stricter than “famous” Sweden but a lot less strict than France, Italy, or some places in the US AFAICT. For instance, you could still go for a walk, go to work (with the caveat that many workplaces were closed, mostly in retail, education and culture) or do grocery shopping. Assemblies of any kind, private or public, of more than 2 people at any time were prohibited though, and a vast majority of people stuck to that. Businesses switched to work-from-home on a huge scale to the point where for a few days, there were worries if our public Internet infrastructure could take it.
And still even if the lockdown was not what I would call draconic, it seems to have been pretty effective, with the number of new cases going down slowly, but steadily - not stalling but actually going down.
The number of daily deaths though, seems to be stable now - not diminishing, but not growing either, except for strong periodic variations when official bureaus close over the weekend, and many cases are reported at the start of the work week.
The big question seems to be now, can we push it down further with the measures we have in place? Or is that just an artifact of testing?
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RKI (central institute of public health of the German government) just released current data on that: RKI - Navigation - Schätzung der aktuellen Entwicklung der SARS-CoV-2-Epidemie in Deutschland - Nowcasting (German only)
This can give you an idea how the stages of the lockdown may have contributed to reduction of cases.
Pg. 13 gives you the development of new cases, they started going down on March 16.
Pg. 15 shows reproduction rate R, which is currently estimated to have reached 1 at March 20. Of course even 1.1 or 1.2 might be bad news for the health system.
Stages of the lockdown were als follows:
- March 9: no large gatherings (more than 1000 people)
- March 10-13: schools were closed
- March 23: social distancing became mandatory (what you call half-assed social distancing)
Of course some people were social distancing voluntarily before that date, and March was pretty warm, so seasonality might have been playing into that.
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Well… correct me if I’m wrong, but chart #5 looks, as if the mandatory social distancing from march 23 on, including ‘semi-curfews’ in some German states, didn’t make a dent at all. It looks more as if the prohibition of large assemblies from march 9, combined with people’s voluntary social distancing, did all the work to bring R0 down, and since then it has been hovering around, or minuscully below 1, completely unfazed by the official lockdown.
The historical record will also include total deaths from all causes which can be compared to a normal year’s total deaths of all causes. It doesn’t tell you which deaths were from covid specifically but it’s a pretty good indicator of magnitude as the numbers are pretty solid.
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But not sacrifice of everyone, just the people they already didn’t care about: the old, the poor, the not-white.
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Exactly, they are not even trying to hide that anymore:
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You’re not wrong in your observation. I forgot to mention one thing though: even before March 9th we had recommendations to wash our hands, self-isolate when sick, and call the doctor (instead of just visiting the practice) if you think you have symptoms. That likely had a huge impact.
With the lockdown, and the priority on Covid19 over elective procedures we now are in the curious situations where hospitals all over Germany send home nurses and doctors on a large scale (Kurzarbeit), because there is not enough work so the hospitals can’t pay them.
We also have, compared to the US of A, a medical system where people can just see a doctor or go to a hospital when they need to. Which is why all these findings don’t necessarily apply to the US.
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it’s growing but it’s curving downward
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that’s not what exponential growth looks like
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even if it were exponential, “the exponent is dropping” is not a thing
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(1) the cases still multiplies by values > 1, yes? That’s exponential in my book.
(2) this factor doesn’t stay constant due to social distancing and other factors changing the equation constantly. So it’s not a clean, textbook function, at least not one that I would know with my interediate math skills. One can go to Wolfram alpha and it will fit a cubic equation on top of any data you like, but the predictive value of such exercises that are not rooted in epidemiological evidence, is next to zero.
“The exponent dropping” is not a technical term of course, but these well publicised graphs clearly show that - a constant multiplication factor, i.e. constant exponant, would show as a straight line due to the logarithmic Y axis - but almost all of them are bending downwards.
Now that would be kind of good news, if there weren’t the sucpicion that this “bending” is, at least in part, due to the test capacity being maxed out. That would also give you a constant daily growth, that with rising absoulte numbers, would appear to be the exponent getting smaller. That’s where we have to look at other data like excess deaths (above yearly average) to get a bound on what’s going on and how the Covid test count fits in with the actual number of victims.
no, not every increasing value is an exponential curve, that’s not what the word means
Look, here is the “cases” graph
It’s not exponential at all.
The “deaths” graph is not either.
Is each day’s report (1 + k) times the previous day’s report?
No.
Is each week’s total (1 + k)7 times the previous week’s total?
No.
The early bit was exponential, but now it’s basically flat, two thousand a day plus or minus noise.
If you look at the weekly totals, they’re curving downward, not up like an exponential curve.
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