5 ms·
The time for symptoms to show up is of roughly 2 weeks but the median time is at about 6-8 days. After symptoms show up, it takes a while before people get hosp
by mononcqc 6y ago
The time for symptoms to show up is of roughly 2 weeks but the median time is at about 6-8 days. After symptoms show up, it takes a while before people get hospitalized, and then mortality seem to take roughly 21-24 days after hospitalization.
This means that from the time someone is infected until they die, a month and a half can have gone through.
By the time you take new isolation measures, you have to wait roughly two weeks to see if daily infection rates start to vary. But the lethality at this point, assuming no change in healthcare system overload, can be more or less statically predicted for weeks after the fact.
Those are called "lagging indicators"; the main thing you try to prevent are deaths, which you can lower by reducing the overload on the healthcare systems, which you can lower by controlling infection rates and keeping them low.
Due to the duration of the disease's evolution, you get to see if your policies really worked more than a month and a half after enacting them, which is extremely slow for a disease that propagates at exponential rates. So people look for proxies like infection rates that are still lagging, but far less so.
Do note that the one good metric you want in the end is going to be "excess deaths", which counts the impact of not just the diseases, but of all other side issues that the disease may have caused. This can usually take months up to years to properly account and analyze.
- ghiculescu 6y agoYep. That was obvious. Thanks!
- jacquesm 6y agoI don't understand. If it wasn't obvious before then it can't be obvious now. You've had it explained to you. If it was obvious then that would not have been necessary.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoSometimes I will look all over for my keys, only to find them in my pocket. This is the obvious place to check first, but I am not perfect, so sometimes I overlook it.
- perl4ever 6y agoI think gathering and reporting the metrics is an additional lag.
- treespace8 6y agoWhat would it mean if deaths did not spike by the end of July?
- eagsalazar2 6y agoThis is the money question, or rephrased "will deaths spike by end of July?". There is so much debate, so much messy data, in a week or two this debate will be over among reasonable people, in a month even extremists will be eating crow. I, like everyone, have my opinion, but soon enough we'll know for sure. People saying "deaths aren't tracking infections" are premature in their assessment by a couple weeks IMO because earlier and more testing is making this peak be shaped differently than the last one. Sorry to hijack, your actual question is interesting too. I guess that would mean all the increased infection metrics are entirely from increases in testing and we're actually seeing that infection rates have always been way higher and the virus is way way less deadly than previously thought? Or maybe it has mutated and become less deadly?