The german institute that is responsible for providing the government with data on the corona virus has done some interesting calculations regardind the development of corona. It's known that there is a delay between the individual outbreak of the corona virus and registration in the health care system. Reasons are health offices not beig open on weekends, waiting time for results, individual time of seeing a doctor and so on.
What the new calculation shows, is that the number of daily newinfections was declining even before the lockdown was in place. Canceling of mass events, closing of schools and change of individual behaviour due to the public discussion were apparently enough. The reprodcution number already was below 1 at that time.
Here are the curves for actual day of illness (red line) vs day of registration (blue line)
The first vertical line is the start of the lockdown, the second line the first ease of restrictions.
The good news here is that we most likely won't need a lockdown to keep corona in check. Consequent social distancing (and masks) will be enough. Reasonable individual behaviour seems key to public health. And we will be able to return to an accepable level of social events and opening business and economic production.
But there is also some bad news. In the last two weeks, the slow down of new infections has almost stopped (look at the end of the red line) and from calculations it seems like there has actually been slow growth of daily new infections in the last couple of days. Seems like compliance with the restrictions is already going down too much. So if this trend continues, we might be back to square one in a couple of weeks (or in the next winter season).
