COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)
So US test capacity has ramped up significantly and we we can now start drawing broader reference from the data.
This chart (on the STAT tracker) shows how positive results have remained fairly steady, while negative results have gone way up. In other words, as testing as increased, rate of positive has decreased. That’s good - it means the outbreak isn’t expanding very much right now.
But it also shows that the virus isn’t that widespread - there aren’t millions of asymptomatic positives walking around. There’s a vast majority of the population that doesn’t have it (yet) - and the genome studies suggest that they haven’t had it (yet).
And that means that if the only thing that has kept the positive rate fairly steady has been mitigation, pulling those measures down simply exposes that population to getting infected - and if the contagiousness remains very high (R-5.7 is the current best estimate based on multiple analyses), there’s a lot of fuel being added to the fire. Case counts should start to move up.
Perhaps there will be a meaningful seasonality to it that will blunt the R0 rate. We’ll see.
So US test capacity has ramped up significantly and we we can now start drawing broader reference from the data.
This chart (on the STAT tracker) shows how positive results have remained fairly steady, while negative results have gone way up. In other words, as testing as increased, rate of positive has decreased. That’s good - it means the outbreak isn’t expanding very much right now.
But it also shows that the virus isn’t that widespread - there aren’t millions of asymptomatic positives walking around. There’s a vast majority of the population that doesn’t have it (yet) - and the genome studies suggest that they haven’t had it (yet).
And that means that if the only thing that has kept the positive rate fairly steady has been mitigation, pulling those measures down simply exposes that population to getting infected - and if the contagiousness remains very high (R-5.7 is the current best estimate based on multiple analyses), there’s a lot of fuel being added to the fire. Case counts should start to move up.
Perhaps there will be a meaningful seasonality to it that will blunt the R0 rate. We’ll see.