according to various models the infection rate should shift from exponential growth to an s-curve function where growth rapidly falls off, the first stage of containment, somewhere around the 15th. the 17th is the monday after that, so many schools and business and cities are planning for everyone to just stay home until the 17th (at least).
>according to various models the infection rate should shift from exponential growth to an s-curve function where growth rapidly falls off
I'm sort of skeptical of such models because the quality of their output is entirely dependent on the data coming in. There were anecdotal accounts of hospitals in China running out of test kits. Limited test kits -> limited diagnosis -> underreported infection numbers -> misleading models. Garbage in, garbage out.
Infections are increasing approximately 20% per day.
When you see the new daily infection rate drop to 10% or less then that's a pretty good signal that we're reaching the top of the S-curve and nearing containment.
The big question is if that will happen before healthcare and quarantine capacity is exceeded.
Couldn't that thinking be flawed, though? I mean, it's only not exponential now because of effective containment. You have to maintain containment until the disease no longer exists. If you don't do that, and the disease exists, then the virus will spread exponentially as soon as containment stops.
It seems to me that the "various models" assume the non-existence of containment attempts. In that case, you have to be careful you're not drawing the wrong conclusions.
