(no subject)

[leblon]

 Good news: deaths from COVID-19 no longer grow exponentially. The trend has changed 4 days ago. This sounds reasonable: this is about 2 weeks after stay-at-home orders were issued in the most affected states.

Comments

[alexanderr]

that could be one reason. another reason could be just from the scale.
no exponent can keep growing on forever

[leblon]

The scale here is set by the size of the American population, which is about 325,000,000. The number of infected people is currently a few hundred thousand, still three orders of magnitude below. So this is not because of the scale, but because of the change in the rate at which the infection is spread.

[alexanderr]

> ...The number of infected people is currently a few hundred thousand....

but only a small fraction of people with symptoms was tested.
and on top of that many people are asymptomatic.
so we really do not know how many were infected.

Cuomo wants to test everyone in NY not only for the virus, but
also for the antibodies. he said that his experts are telling him
that only in NY there are "hundreds of thousands" who are
already immune. so they are negative for the virus, but
positive for the antibodies. and the quarantine can be lifted for them today.
they are not going to infect anyone

[leblon]

I do not trust the reported numbers of infected people either, I am sure there are many more than reported. I can readily believe that the actual number is 2-3 times larger. But not 200 times larger!

[alexanderr]

right. the numbers can be off even 10 times or 20 times. 200 times is hard to imagine, I agree.
I do not think the official numbers are only off by a factor of 2 or 3, that would be
an amazing level of precision