But information on testing numbers is also lagging and incomplete. The CDC was doing over 5k tests per day a week ago when the number of new cases was around 500 per day. And the number of tests were exponentially increasing too. Does anyone have any better info about how much we have ramped up testing since then? It's a big country, and there's huge "publication bias" in the media where stories about a location or person running into testing issues get the attention and stories where things are working do not. I really don't trust anyone's ability to assess the situation at the resolution of 24 hours and make anything like an accurate prediction. I would like to see them just do full-on statistical sampling by testing people at random in different cities.
With California at 1060, then I can only imagine where the final number will land. And New York has 5712 infected, and yet, they still haven’t shut down the state.
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Now, the following is likely incorrect, but this may give an general idea of the magnitude. But doing a basic extrapolation, China had a 160x multiplier, from the initial lockdown point, to get to 80,000 infected.
If we use that, then at this point, California might register about 169,000 infected. And New York, if they lock down now, might register 914,000 infected.
Sobering numbers indeed..
But these numbers are highly dependent on population density, mass transportation patterns, and social congregation scenarios. Wuhan has high speed trains, but California has Southwest planes. Car travel and ride sharing usage might be similar. So it’s unlikely the numbers are similar to compute.
At some point, the medical system will fail, and everyone will just give up, and we are now left to our own fate.
It's true though that they aren't using the highest rate they could (the 20% per day we got before social distancing). I hope that closing the schools helps... and the ICUs don't overflow immediately.