I gave up on trying to model the situation. According to available data, the number of cases grows linearly—faster in some countries, slower in other countries, but almost everywhere linearly; approximately the same number of people infected each day. This doesn’t make sense to me. This stuff is supposed to be exponential, right?
Linear growth could make sense for a small country, such as Slovakia, if the internal situation is under control, and the number of infections is proportional to the number of people crossing the border. But what about bigger countries? What about those that do not have the situation under control?
A friend proposed a hypothesis that for countries like USA the reported number of infections is simply the number of people that were tested on given day, which is just a small fraction of the true number of infections. It makes sense to assume that the number of people tested each day is constant. But if the hidden growth was truly exponential, the difference between the true number of cases and the official number of cases would soon become visible… and that didn’t happen.
Another hypothesis is that politicians are already doing the “dance” as a consequence of their incentives: when the number of cases grows too quickly, there is a pressure to do something about it, and when it stops growing, there is a pressure to relax the measures, so the result is linear growth. Doesn’t sound plausible either: the incubation period is a week, so the reactive policy should lead to a sine wave instead of linear growth.
tl;dr—I don’t know; any hypothesis sounds wrong
The seasonal hypothesis would make sense if it’s not the absolute temperature that matters, but rather the relative sunshine, compared to the rest of the year. That is, the Sun does not have an impact on viruses directly, but rather on people, like it creates a yearly metabolic cycle, with different resistance to diseases at different parts of the cycle. But this is just something I made up, and I have no idea whether there is any support for this in biology.
Sorry about your situation. Could you perhaps try to have Skype calls with your colleagues during the work time? I mean, when you are at work, you probably take breaks and socialize. You can do the same at home, too. People working from home often forget to take breaks.
I gave up on trying to model the situation. According to available data, the number of cases grows linearly—faster in some countries, slower in other countries, but almost everywhere linearly; approximately the same number of people infected each day. This doesn’t make sense to me. This stuff is supposed to be exponential, right?
Linear growth could make sense for a small country, such as Slovakia, if the internal situation is under control, and the number of infections is proportional to the number of people crossing the border. But what about bigger countries? What about those that do not have the situation under control?
A friend proposed a hypothesis that for countries like USA the reported number of infections is simply the number of people that were tested on given day, which is just a small fraction of the true number of infections. It makes sense to assume that the number of people tested each day is constant. But if the hidden growth was truly exponential, the difference between the true number of cases and the official number of cases would soon become visible… and that didn’t happen.
Another hypothesis is that politicians are already doing the “dance” as a consequence of their incentives: when the number of cases grows too quickly, there is a pressure to do something about it, and when it stops growing, there is a pressure to relax the measures, so the result is linear growth. Doesn’t sound plausible either: the incubation period is a week, so the reactive policy should lead to a sine wave instead of linear growth.
tl;dr—I don’t know; any hypothesis sounds wrong
The seasonal hypothesis would make sense if it’s not the absolute temperature that matters, but rather the relative sunshine, compared to the rest of the year. That is, the Sun does not have an impact on viruses directly, but rather on people, like it creates a yearly metabolic cycle, with different resistance to diseases at different parts of the cycle. But this is just something I made up, and I have no idea whether there is any support for this in biology.
Sorry about your situation. Could you perhaps try to have Skype calls with your colleagues during the work time? I mean, when you are at work, you probably take breaks and socialize. You can do the same at home, too. People working from home often forget to take breaks.