I’m super curious about the shape of these daily death curves.
One would expect the peak to be about 1-2 weeks after social distancing measures are put in place, which has been fairly representative of the trends. But after the peak I would expect to see a statistically significant dip. Obviously it wouldn’t be a symmetrical bell curve, but a definite point where SD was put into place and a sharp, maybe small, but sharp decline. A place you could point to and say this was the result of social distancing.
What we do see is the peak, a plateau, and a gradual taper down. Like in Italy, the plateau itself lasted about two weeks of around 800 deaths per day. The death toll continued to climb well after social distancing, as you would expect given the incubation period of the virus, and then hovered for an additional two weeks at peak level deaths. That shouldn’t be the case. That would mean that during week two of lockdown/social distancing there were just as many new infections as pre-social distancing infection rates. And even when the daily death figure begins to inch downward, often over a month after lockdown, that suggests that 3-4 weeks in to lockdown you are only seeing a marginal decrease in new infections.
There has to be some missing data here...
