4 ms·

Cumulative infections would not be a bell curve. They'd be a sigmoid curve, approaching some upper limit (e.g. 100,000). Current Hospitalizations, which is the

Cumulative infections would not be a bell curve. They'd be a sigmoid curve, approaching some upper limit (e.g. 100,000). Current Hospitalizations, which is the number we should be most concerned about, and is reflected by the orange dots on the state's graph, should start low, max out at a number, and eventually return to 0. That should follow something like a bell curve. I think the confusion is between the "total infections" curve and the "current hospitalizations" curve. The difference between them is huge, and really important. The "Flatten the Curve" idea refers to keeping the number of hospitalizations at any one moment below some upper limit, ideally the state's number of available ICU beds. That's a bell curve.

SquishyPanda23 7y ago
> think the confusion is between the "total infections" curve and the "current hospitalizations" curve. I think the confusion is that if the CDF is the logistic function, then the PDF is the logistic distribution. This is what archgoon is saying. Bell curve refers to a Gaussian distribution, which is different but looks similar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_distribution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_distribution http://visionlab.harvard.edu/Members/Anne/Math/Logistic_vs_Gaussian.html http://visionlab.harvard.edu/Members/Anne/Math/Logistic_vs_G...