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Something people are misreading is that currently, the thing that is increasing exponentially is testing capacity. The thing you don't need testing capacity to

by zaroth 7y ago

Something people are misreading is that currently, the thing that is increasing exponentially is testing capacity. The thing you don't need testing capacity to detect is the serious and critical cases. So, look at the "Total Number of Severe or Critical Cases" over time. [1] Note that for cases which will be "severe" that the median time to onset of severe symptoms is 1 week (WHO report). Median time for any symptoms is 5-6 days. So essentially, if it is going to get bad, it gets bad quickly. What this indicates to me is that now that there is finally some actual testing capacity being deployed, we will see a lot of "new" cases, but they are old infections. Growth of the case count is not indicative of the actual current "growth factor", or R0 in the community. [1] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/#serious-critical https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/...

dforrestwilson 7y ago
Really interesting point regarding severe cases. One follow-up - why do you think we had so many severe cases in late Feb? I still think we can all acknowledge at this time that this is an endemic virus. Containment is no longer possible.
- zaroth 7y ago
  It appears that it may be coming under control in South Korea actually. We need a few more days to be sure. It also appears to be under control in China as well, with less than 100 new cases reported there yesterday. Containment in an absolute sense is not possible, but the data does not support a conclusion that pervasive infection (e.g. 10% of world population, as what happens every year with the flu) is inevitable. Arguably the only two data points we have at this point seem to point to containment actually being possible. Only once the daily testing rate has stabilized can you directly observe the new case growth rate without a bias. My theory on the severe case load in China is that the total infection rate is under-reported by at least an order of magnitude. We’ll only ever know if we have reliable serological testing (for antibodies) which is not yet being done.

by zaroth 7y ago

dforrestwilson 7y ago

Really interesting point regarding severe cases. One follow-up - why do you think we had so many severe cases in late Feb? I still think we can all acknowledge at this time that this is an endemic virus. Containment is no longer possible.

zaroth 7y ago
It appears that it may be coming under control in South Korea actually. We need a few more days to be sure. It also appears to be under control in China as well, with less than 100 new cases reported there yesterday. Containment in an absolute sense is not possible, but the data does not support a conclusion that pervasive infection (e.g. 10% of world population, as what happens every year with the flu) is inevitable. Arguably the only two data points we have at this point seem to point to containment actually being possible. Only once the daily testing rate has stabilized can you directly observe the new case growth rate without a bias. My theory on the severe case load in China is that the total infection rate is under-reported by at least an order of magnitude. We’ll only ever know if we have reliable serological testing (for antibodies) which is not yet being done.