These are fascinating. But all of this data seems to indicate to me that this virus has a far longer incubation period than what I was led to believe. Right, how can it be that it continues to spread at the same rate weeks into quarantine?
What I heard was an average of 5 day incubation period (rarely up to 2 weeks). But early symptoms are often things like slight sore throat or mild fever or a slight cough, which might be easily confused for other respiratory viruses or seasonal allergies. People with minor symptoms are told to stay home and not tested in many places.
People often start experiencing more serious symptoms 1 or 1.5 weeks after symptom onset. Then getting a test result can take another 0.5–1.5 weeks.
Deaths are typically not occurring until something like 3–4 weeks after initial infection. Then in some cases data about deaths can take at least a few days to be aggregated in regional/national statistics.
So any public health measure instituted today will take at least 2 weeks to show up in the data about number of cases, and at least 3 weeks to show up in the data about deaths. Full effect of public health interventions is probably not seen in the data until a month or more later.
And keep in mind that public health interventions are only as effective as the public’s willingness to follow them. If someone is getting their news from a source which repeatedly claims that this is all overhyped and there’s nothing to worry about, they might not take appropriate personal action.
Most mainstream news has moved away from their earlier “we should more worried about the flu” consensus they were pushing during the democratic primaries.
- Testing ramp catching up with community spread. A US congressional source was saying a week ago that the disease waas spreading faster than testing. Likely still the case.
- Entrenched community outbreak and transmission.
- High-density regions with rapid transmission. The US east coast has leapfrogged early outbreaks in WA and CA (though these also likely have undertesting). New York State (overwhelmingly NYC) alone would be the world's 6th largest outbreak.
- Many regions remain in denial, have grossly inadequate response, or are mishandling the outbreak. In the US, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi are saying and doing innane things, even by standards set at the national level. Mexico is in fiull denial. Brazil's mafia are imposing quarantines where the. government won't. And rumblings (see Tyler Cowan) are that Japan may come unglued again.
A possible (I think probable) explanation is that we're seeing in this graph a ramp in testing, not a ramp in infection.
If we were to just randomly select individuals for infection and antibody s teeming, we could generate a clearer picture of this. Absent that, look at total death figures 14 days later for a decent proxy...
