3 ms·
We don't really know about transmission rates, since all we have is case counts, which are only a lower bound for infection counts (which are likely much higher
by _-___________-_ 7y ago
We don't really know about transmission rates, since all we have is case counts, which are only a lower bound for infection counts (which are likely much higher).
You can't look at the growth in case numbers and infer much about transmission rate from that, because it is constrained by testing capacity and testing policy.
- standardUser 7y agoBut we can look at hospitalization and deaths to get an actual idea of which areas are being hit the hardest. We generally know how long an outbreak has been occurring in a region. The differences between Spain and Japan, for example, are obvious when we look at the start of the outbreak and the results (in terms of death and hospitalizations) at different weekly intervals. If the virus spread uniformly through all populations, we would expect Japan to look a lot more like Italy and a lot less like South Korea, based on the nature of their respective government responses. There are discrepancies like this all over the world.