Ignoring Country Cohorts
I assume that many of you have been watching the "total coronavirus cases outside of China" number. If you look at them on a log chart, they appear to be growing perfectly exponentially and doubling every 4-5 days. This perfect straight line is obscuring a very, very important underlying fact....
Mar 8, 20206
Thanks for your comments! Yes, I'm aware this is a log chart (which is why I referenced the second derivative falling). A revised version of a paper actually came out today with some very good data backing up my analysis. Please reference the tab "reproduction numbers over time in the six countries with the most cases currently." There is also more per country analysis down below on that page.
This is obviously in part because of the quarantine efforts, but my point is that we are significantly overestimating the doubling period currently because all are data on cases outside of China is from countries that only recently started testing at scale.
Last week, it looked like the doubling period was 4 days, by the end of next week we'll be talking about an 8 day lower bound for ex-China cases.