There’s a huge confounder here which is testing ramp up: it’s hard to say how much of growth in confirmed cases is growth in actual infections vs growth in testing. For example if you look at the graph of cases vs graph of tests in the US they track closely, and the % of positive tests hasn’t changed much.
However there’s another dataset which doesn’t have this problem—the kinsa smart thermometer dataset, and it indicates that social distancing has been highly effective at curbing all flu-like infections in the US.
Comparing confirmed cases to deaths should identify that confounder if it’s there. Interestingly the US is one of the countries which showed up as possibly confounded at the beginning. More recently I suspect this is less of an issue.
My analysis suggests about a 40% decrease in R due to hygiene and social distancing. R0 is ~3 for COVID-19 so this bring R down to ~1.8 which means the virus is still growing fairly fast. For flu R0 is ~1.3 so after these measures R is ~0.8 and therefore is shrinking.
There’s a huge confounder here which is testing ramp up: it’s hard to say how much of growth in confirmed cases is growth in actual infections vs growth in testing. For example if you look at the graph of cases vs graph of tests in the US they track closely, and the % of positive tests hasn’t changed much.
However there’s another dataset which doesn’t have this problem—the kinsa smart thermometer dataset, and it indicates that social distancing has been highly effective at curbing all flu-like infections in the US.
Comparing confirmed cases to deaths should identify that confounder if it’s there. Interestingly the US is one of the countries which showed up as possibly confounded at the beginning. More recently I suspect this is less of an issue.
My analysis suggests about a 40% decrease in R due to hygiene and social distancing. R0 is ~3 for COVID-19 so this bring R down to ~1.8 which means the virus is still growing fairly fast. For flu R0 is ~1.3 so after these measures R is ~0.8 and therefore is shrinking.