May 2 - Improvements Continue. What's Next?

1. Despite large daily fluctuations, I resist switching to smoothed plots for Days-to-Double because this way one can see both daily fluctuations and long-term trends. The improvements clearly continue and the question shifts to What's Next?

2. One of the key pieces of information needed to assess what's next is how many people have been infected overall. The other way to ask the same question is, What is the real IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) for Covid-19. Latest studies indicate that IFR is below 1% and perhaps even as low as that of the seasonal flue (i.e. ~0.1%).

3. If one uses either of these estimates and attempts to derive the number of infected from the number of deaths, it is straightforward to see that the number of reported positives drastically underestimates the true number of infected. Take for instance the World-wide numbers. At this very moment, there are about 250,000 deaths due to Covid-19 World-wide. With 1% IFR, this would imply at least 25 Million infected, which is an order of magnitude larger than the 3.5 Million reported "Coronavirus Cases" (or positively tested). Approximately the same holds for every country, every State in the USA, etc. This could also imply that the countries like Italy, Spain, France, and UK as well as the State of New York perhaps went through their respective peaks of infected prior to implementing their stay-at-home policies! Just contemplating this possibility is jaw-dropping...

#COVID-19