Counterpoint: Santa Clara county locked down 3 days earlier than Los Angeles, but a week later on the epidemic curve. LA right now has had nearly twice the death rate per capita, and unlike Santa Clara which is almost at the end of the curve, may not even have peaked.

Lockdowns aren't everything..

Santa Clara’s official lockdown, and the tech world’s “work from home” mandates were separated by about a week, which could account for some of this.

Santa Clara has less population density and air pollution.

> Not relative to number of cases: Germany locked down later than UK, but a week earlier on the exponential growth curve.

Not according to the Financial Times graph in the post I was commenting on. Germany went into lockdown at 3000 cases per day, while the UK went into lockdown at 700 cases per day, and Spain at 600 cases per day, according to that.

Is the FT graph wrong? Do you have a better data source that proves your point?

You're missing an implicit assumption - that each country's testing regimes and levels and criteria were comparable - for an example from the top of my head, some countries only test if you show symptoms.

So if you'll allow me to rephrase:

> Germany went into lockdown at 3000 known cases per day, while the UK went into lockdown at 700 known cases per day, and Spain at 600 known cases per day.

As you said earlier, so many damn factors in this.

To add more data, Germany locked down on Mar 17 at 24 known deaths. The UK locked down on Mar 23 at 336 known deaths. Germany reached 342 known deaths on Mar 27. That's 10 days of lead time on the deaths metric.

Germany's new deaths per day (smoothed) stopped increasing at 215 per day on Apr 9 (2.5 weeks later). The UK's death rate stopped increasing at 850 on Apr 15 (2.5 weeks later).

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

Deaths tend to be more accurate than just confirmed cases.

One way to account for testing rates is to look at the test positive rate, and use that as a proxy. If the test positive rate is 50% (as it was in Spain at some point), you can be pretty sure you’re missing a lot of cases.

So if Spain has “600 cases” but only did 1200 tests, they probably have way more real cases than Germany’s “3000 cases” out of 30,000 tests.

FWIW, Germany had 9 deaths on March 17, while UK had 10 deaths on March 14. By that metric, the UK led Germany by 3 days. There’s more to it than just the one national lockdown date — in particular, Germany is federal and I think different states went into lockdown at different times, as in the US.

But meanwhile, South Korea and Taiwan have avoided lockdowns entirely, so it’s clearly not only about lockdown timing — availability of testing, as in Germany, helps a lot with keeping the sick isolated.