Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: April 28, 2020 08:48PM
[|] is right.
Do you recall the little math clip I posted a week or two ago? It explained geometric and logistical growth in the context of a pandemic. I'll append it below since it is way clearer than what I can write.
That said, R is the rate of infection. R below one means every sufferer infects less than one other person; R=1 means every person infects one more; R above one means everyone infects more than one person. If R is less than one, total infections and deaths will fall over time. The effects won't be evident for a couple of weeks since that's how long it takes people to get sick and go to the hospital, so R is a leading indicator showing what the hospitals will see in 2-3 weeks.
In the early stages of the pandemic everywhere, R increased past 1 and stabilized at around 1.2 or 1.25. That is a really bad situation, meaning the disease is expanding exponentially. The goal for every country was/is to get R down below 1, meaning that the pandemic is shrinking although the ultimate goal is to get R to zero. R below one simply signals that cautious reopening may be possible.
What has happened in Germany is that R was rising (rate of infection accelerating), then they implemented controls and R decelerated to below one, indicating that the contagion was beginning to shrink and it might be safe to loosen things up.
The news I provided earlier today, however, indicates that R is rising again--meaning that the loosening of social controls was causing the rate of contagion to grow again. If R surpasses 1.0, Germany will see geometric increase resume. The number of infected, hospitalizations, and deaths won't rise until after a couple of weeks during which the infections become disease and make people sick. So we must all hope that R starts to decline again either naturally or due to the reimposition of controls.
Where your information and mine diverge is that yours depicts the situation today whereas my reliance on R describes what will happen in two weeks. The two data are NOT incompatible. Mine simply indicates that the variables you are following may worsen considerably over the next few weeks. More importantly, my data should tell Berlin that it has to act fast or the pandemic will take off again.
Here's the video. It presumes familiarity with high school math but is a good, simple primer on pandemics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrgEdited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2020 11:36PM by Lot's Wife.