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SvennoJ on 07 May 2020
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SpokenTruth said:
SvennoJ said:

Not quite the way it works after all this slow down. You need to take the current daily reported cases and start from there again with the 4.5 day doubling rate based on highest doubling rates in reported deaths. That's the doubling rate for R0 2.2. Early on it was doubling at a much higher rate due to starting / catching up on testing, catching a lot of ongoing cases that could have been infected as much as a month earlier or even longer.

So at a rate of adding about 25K cases a day currently, going back to full spread, which is very close to 3x increase in infections every week.

75K new daily cases after a week
225K new daily cases after 2 weeks
2 million new daily cases after 4 weeks
162 million new daily cases after 8 weeks

About 2 months to reach herd immunity and mass graves :/

That's why I say it's very hard to guess because we don't know what the rate would be if we just opened everything up full throttle and applied no further mitigations. All of our data has been under different circumstances...either with the lagging indicator of early testing or now with mitigations in place.

I've been sifting through the available data and that 4.5 day doubling rate is the fastest I could find based on reported deaths, before measures were in effect, based on available mobility data. It takes on average 20 days to die from covid 19, so any deaths reported up to 25 days after mobility trends change can still be regarded as a result of unhampered growth. Russia's mobility data didn't change until the start of April where a sharp drop occurs, thus any reported deaths until about April 25th can still be considered as part of the 'normal' progression stage.

But yeah, it's hard to guess since population density, living and work conditions play a major role. It will spread fastest in city centers and low income neighborhoods while progressing slower in the suburbs and much slower in rural communities.

See that latest study of the Imperial college, they take a lot of factors into account
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-05-04-COVID19-Report-20.pdf
The more precise the narrower or more specific the results are for each subdivision.

It's a definite problem for any herd immunity strategies. It may reach saturation point in a city center, yet the suburbs will still progress and can still infect the remaining non immune people in the city centers. It's why vaccination only works if you do it evenly on a mass scale. On the flip side, you likely also need less immunity in rural areas to reach local herd immunity, but it will take a lot longer to reach that point the natural way.

Fine tuning social distancing based on location would have the same effect. More restrictions inside cities, less in rural areas to keep the spread under the 1.0x factor.