May 5 - Fluctuations, Improvements, and ... the Opening

1. Continued improvements through large daily ups and downs. All plots can be seen here as always, but below we also show SMA5-smoothed World data for more clarity of the long-term trend.

2. If you have a question as to why the plots of the ratio of deaths to positives show plateauing at ~5.8% for the USA and ~7.3% for NYS and yet we talk about IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) being ~0.5% or lower, that is a good question! (We can explain that along with all of its implications here at some later time.)

3. It can be said that it is well-established 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 260,000 deaths due to Covid-19 World-wide. With 1% IFR, this would imply at least 26 Million infected, which is an order of magnitude larger than the 3.7 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 but has huge implications on how to best proceed to the opening phase.

#COVID-19