Original in Spanish: Bajar el ratio de contagio de 1
I lack data, and so do they.
The key is getting the contagion ratio below 1, so as not to collapse the health system (further). Not counting that people who fall ill spend weeks in hospital…
If with what we’re doing each infected person is already infecting fewer than 1, we could hold where we are. Assuming the average 14-day incubation period is right, we should start noticing the effects of the quarantine this weekend. It seems tests are starting to arrive so random samples of the population can be checked. Let’s see what grade we get…
To avoid waiting that long, we can use what has been happening in Italy as a reference. If we assume our quarantine is exactly as efficient as theirs at lowering the contagion ratio, we’re going to be in trouble. They aren’t testing enough to have a reliable infection count either, but we do know their deaths haven’t stopped growing, and if it’s true that the gravely ill die 20 days after infection (14 incubating and 6 very sick), they should already be seeing day-over-day decreases in deaths. And no, deaths in Italy keep growing.
On the other hand, there’s no point producing things nobody will buy. In China, if they kept producing non-essential goods, it was because we were buying them as if the problem were theirs alone. Right now our neighbours are as stuck as we are, eating lentils and consuming Netflix. There’s not much point in making haute couture dresses in this context. GDP grows when you sell, not when you produce and it rots in a warehouse.
And to finish the wall of text: right now I would pay to know the daily deaths in Spain, with historical data to see day-to-day variability and seasonality, ideally by age and sex. Coronavirus deaths are already big enough to be significant, and I think it would be a more reliable way to compare between countries with different data-collection methodologies than what we’re being given. After all, counting the dead, whatever they died of, is much easier than comparing “deaths by coronavirus”, whatever each country understands by that.
(Facebook, 2020-03-24)