3 ms·

Yeah, I misremembered the growth rate in Italy. But check out the reference that I provided, most countries are in the high 20s / low 30s, many of them for mult

by svara 7y ago

Yeah, I misremembered the growth rate in Italy. But check out the reference that I provided, most countries are in the high 20s / low 30s, many of them for multiple weeks. If there really was a 10% "true" growth, and higher growth was just testing capacity ramping up, you would see very few straight lines in that plot. Yet that is what you see in all cases except for China, South Korea and Iran. Also, you can't look at the world-wide growth rate since January like that, since that includes a period where the total number of cases was totally dominated by Chinese cases, but China had slowed already. Actually, the fact that you get 15% by using this approach which substantially underestimates the growth shows that 10% is way too low.

kragen 7y ago
Maybe, you could be right. Certainly Italy and Spain have already exceeded South Korea's cases per capita, as well as deaths per capita: Italy, Spain, and South Korea have respectively 1809, 335, and 75 deaths†, with populations of 60.3 million, 46.7 million, and 51.7 million, for rates of 3.0, 0.7, and 0.145 per 100,000 population to date. So it's implausible that South Korea's dramatic improvement is due to a much larger number of subclinical cases saturating the population and preventing further spread, and I understand that their testing is quite comprehensive as well, so it probably isn't due to underreporting either (which in any case is less likely for death rates); if that's true, it would seem that the only plausible conclusion is that containment is working in South Korea. I think it's reasonable to expect that similar containment measures will be put in place in most countries soon, though, so perhaps it's not unreasonable to take them into account when trying to estimate future growth rates. † https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_data&oldid=945854474 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:2019%E2%...

by svara 7y ago

kragen 7y ago

Maybe, you could be right. Certainly Italy and Spain have already exceeded South Korea's cases per capita, as well as deaths per capita: Italy, Spain, and South Korea have respectively 1809, 335, and 75 deaths†, with populations of 60.3 million, 46.7 million, and 51.7 million, for rates of 3.0, 0.7, and 0.145 per 100,000 population to date. So it's implausible that South Korea's dramatic improvement is due to a much larger number of subclinical cases saturating the population and preventing further spread, and I understand that their testing is quite comprehensive as well, so it probably isn't due to underreporting either (which in any case is less likely for death rates); if that's true, it would seem that the only plausible conclusion is that containment is working in South Korea. I think it's reasonable to expect that similar containment measures will be put in place in most countries soon, though, so perhaps it's not unreasonable to take them into account when trying to estimate future growth rates. † https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_data&oldid=945854474 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:2019%E2%...