Here's the comment:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/09/the-spys-dilemma-and-the-lockdown-dichotomy/#comment-2961243.
suffolkboy, thank you for your very apt and lucid
comment. I too am trying make as much sense out of all this as I can. The way I
thought of to test whether Farr's Law (S shaped cumulative cases function, with
symmetrical curves at the two ends) applies was to look at the countries which
are nearest to over the epidemic.
South Korea seems to go for a while as if it is going to
be symmetrical, but instead around March 10th settles into a fairly constant
linear upward trend. Presumably this is due to increased roll-out of testing?
Or could it be that the virus is expanding into parts of the country it hasn't
reached before?
The Faeroe Islands gives something very close to a Farr's
Law curve. It's such a small population that the virus seems to have gone
straight through them all before anybody could do anything. They have tested
11% of their population now, so their figures are going to be as good as
anyone's. Furthermore, they haven't had a single death yet! Iceland is on a
similar path (9.5% of the population tested, 6 deaths), but the
straightening-out of the cumulative cases curve isn't clear yet. Why the death
toll in Iceland and the Faeroes is so low, in comparison to other small
isolated places like San Marino and Andorra, which are among the very worst, is
an interesting question.
Austria is showing a good attempt at a symmetrical curve,
but if you look at the new daily cases it looks as if the right tail is going
to be longer than the left. Maybe twice as long? But again, perhaps that's due to
expanded testing finding cases which wouldn't have been found before.
What I have been trying to do is use an Excel spreadsheet
to try to detect the peak in each country directly. What I do is average each
day's reading with the 3 days prior and the 3 days after. This seems to smooth
the data (which seems in most countries to have a persistent "wobble"
in the new case count, with a period of 5-6 days) quite well. Here is what I've
found so far:
Spain - peaked on 29th March, now down to 75% of peak.
Italy - peaked on 23rd March, now 72% of peak.
Germany - peaked on 30th March, now 82% of peak.
Switzerland - peaked on 22nd March, now 67% of peak.
Austria - peaked on 25th March, now 40% of peak. They
seem to be the country to follow.
Portugal - peaked on 31st March, now 88% of peak.
Norway - peaked on 26th March, now 56% of peak. Second
best after the Austrians.
Belgium and the Netherlands are currently wobbling around
what seems likely to be their peak. The UK, Sweden, Ireland and Denmark are
still trending upwards, but increasingly slowly. France, I haven't even looked
at, because all their data prior to 3rd April is in essence rubbish.
As to whether it is the lockdowns that are having an
effect, or the virus starting to peter out naturally (which would require an
earlier entry of the virus to each country, and a much higher proportion of
unreported asymptomatic and mild cases, than we're being led to expect), I'm
firmly in the agnostic camp at the moment. Evidence for the lockdowns doing it
is that the time lapse from lockdown to peak seems to be varying between about
6 and 15 days. But this could simply be a result of each government deciding to
impose a lockdown at much the same point in the epidemic. Hopefully, Sweden
will give us some conclusive data one way or another.
On the other hand, there's evidence from the geographical
distribution of cases in the Netherlands for a much higher level of immunity in
the general population than many think. Most of the "hot spots" there
are in rural areas, many of them way out in the south-east of the country. The
densely populated Randstad is little affected. In particular, Amsterdam and
Rotterdam are showing lower cases per population even than some of the more
suburban areas around them. That will
need some explaining.
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