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SvennoJ on 16 August 2020
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Mnementh said:
JRPGfan said:

Germany is 84,000,000 or so..... you guys had 700 new cases yesterday.
Its a big country.

Imagine if accross the entire USA, they found ~2700 cases (usa pop vs germ pop, multipled by germans daily numbers),
and said "we need to shut things down again"? They daily have 55,000-65,000 new cases.
Meanwhile they are like "this is fine, it'll all just go away soon, cant let the cure be worse than the cause"

Hell even denmark we had 100 cases yesterday, and we're a much smaller country than germany.
So germany honestly isn't so bad off with infections yet.

First of all, the 700 cases is the weekend decrease, it was already going up towards 1500 a day. But that isn't even the important part. The important part is: if numbers increase, and nothing is changed so that the reasons why numbers are rising are kept, then the increase will become faster and faster over time. The reason is simple. If ten infected people themself cause say 15 new infections, then 100 people cause 150 and 1000 people cause 1500. So as long as the growth rate is staying the same, the faster the infection will spread over time. If you stop that early on, than it will never reach big numbers.

That and it might accelerate as well. One infected person in a room might keep the micro droplet viral load in the air low enough not to infect anyone else in the room. Two combined might push it over the edge to infect one or multiple others.

An evenly spread low infection rate is better than the same amount of infected people in a small area, hence hot spots tend to flare up quite dramatically. However let it continue to slowly build up everywhere and you create the conditions for a country wide flare up. It works both ways, get Rt low enough and at some point the amplification effect disappears and cases drop faster. Yet allow the 'base load' of infections to increase again and they can start to amplify each other.


Ugh, one of my kid's friends' dad just invited everyone for a big end of summer party next Saturday. We declined of course (sorry we're social distancing) but they will be in class together... Stay away from your friend.... :/