From Karl Denninger The Market Ticker. I like him because he is consistent in his approach and data driven. Last line: The key: REOPEN THE ECONOMY NOW.
Ok, this has enough time on it now to publish it.. I can go backward further, if I want to. This data is somewhat noisy, and it assumes that testing is in fact taking place and we're catching cases on the same basis. That is, it does not matter if you are only catch serious cases (e.g. people who have a fever, etc) provided you always do so on the same basis over time. It does not matter if you randomly test people for active virus instead, provided you always do that over time. You can set the testing parameters (what you must present with to get a test) however you want and so long as that parameter remains the same over time the results are valid because the proportion of the cases you catch will remain constant – that's the key.
This also presumes a 4-5 day "generation" time (I'm using 5.) That's our best guess; changing that is easy of course. How do you know you have the generation time right? To a material degree it's a guess, but we can back into it using the inflection points on the daily case graphs.
(As a note this is a smoothed computation off the daily deltas over each period; non-smoothed tends to err higher if you're curious. I'm giving the mitigation strategies the benefit of the doubt, in other words.)
This data is from the national (and state level ) survey data updated every day at 4:00 ET; I use the daily update so it is consistent. The Sweden data is from the European survey information and I go back and check it as their test data apparently comes in sometimes late, so a given date will update back a couple of days pretty much all the time (e.g. a handful of positives that weren't on the given day, but a day later are there.) Note that Sweden has urged people at high risk to stay at home and has issued guidelines, but with few exceptions (e.g. large gatherings, etc) has not issued force-stay-at-home or "lockdown" orders.
The important fact is that attempting to drive R0 below 1.0, where the infection would extinguish, is futile. It has not worked here and it has not worked in Sweden. It also doesn't matter if you do it because you cannot possibly get the last case, and if you don't then the geometric series resumes immediately when you drop the constraints.
Further, despite the earlier and more-serious "lockdown" there is no material difference between NY and the nation as a whole. While NY is grossly over-represented in testing they're not getting materially better results than the nation as a whole.
Note that the "shelter in place" model that is in fact issued virtually everywhere has had enough time (one 5 day period) to show the results we are going to get. It is leveling off and does not appear to be able to be driven below 1.0.
Further, Birx just lied flat-out – she said that the folks in CA have a materially better curve than the rest of the country, specifically NY. When she ran that line of crap I updated the table to include CA. You can see there is no difference as the policies are basically the same and so are the results, end-to-end. You are a fraud Birx!
The policies we have enacted are not going to work. The data is clear. Attempting to suppress it further is a waste of time and since we cannot obtain and hold <1.0 the infection will not extinguish.
Again, as I have noted since the beginning, as soon as you drop the constraints the former geometric spike is still going to occur.
We are destroying our economy for no purpose as we are not evading the outcome that is in fact inevitable. We are pretty-much all going to get this virus, like it or not.
We must take a different path, which I will lay out in detail tomorrow. The key: REOPEN THE ECONOMY NOW.