Bad News - It turns out the R0 for the primary strain of SARS-CoV-2 in our area is much higher than previously understood ... studies just released in the past few days from the CDC reveal that the R0 of SARS-CoV-2 is 5-6, not 2-3! ... this fundamentally changes the modeling that has been released to-date ... stay tuned for new projections on spread (I'll be doing my own modeling but this will be less complete than shops with dozens of statisticians) ... in essence what this means, if the finding holds out to be true, is that social distancing is going to be the only realistic means of blunting the incidence ("new infections") and preventing the health system from getting overwhelmed ... since every ventilator capable hospital bed is fungible, those taken up with CoVID-19 patients are unavailable for anyone else This is the article with the new *higher* R0 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article?deliveryName=USCDC_333-DM25287 This is a link to other, slightly older but still important graphical representations of the pandemic https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00758-2
New Scientist on higher R0
Good News - you can't rely on "new cases" to ascertain the effectiveness of social distancing and public health efforts to blunt the spread - these are highly variable measures that are dependent on testing and self reporting ... you have to rely on more accurate measures like CoVID-19 fatalities ... Based on etiology ("disease progression") each fatality is a 3-4 week lagging indicator of underlying infections - prevalence ("who HAS the disease") ... By this measure, the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in NYC/Greenwich/Stamford has plateaued! ... if we continue the isolation and quarantine measures, we may just blunt the incidence and allow our health system to handle the influx ... this will allow breathing room for the development of therapeutics and treatment protocols for more effective handling of the infected and eventually (11-18 months out) the development of vaccines
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