Extreme testing policies wouldn’t hide exponential growth - if it is growing exponentially, you’d expect the number of people meeting the criteria to also grow exponentially.
A month ago Italy was fine and now 5,000 people are dead. A month ago the virus had been in Japan for a month already... and still today fewer than 50 deaths.
Obviously time will tell with all of this. But so far, time has told us that either a) the transmission rate is extremely low in Japan for some reason or b) no one is dying from the virus in the world's oldest country, for some even harder to explain reason.
The world needs to be looking hard at Japan to see what the hell is going on there.
It’s unlikely to take that long, in the US our number of dead ~= number of infected 2 weeks ago. Part of that is from in insufficient testing, but 30+% daily increases mean 2,600+% growth per month.
If the number of tests administered is the limiting factor, and if you only increase the number of tests linearly in time, then case numbers would grow linear as well.
Only if all tests are positive already. Otherwise you should see an exponentially increasing number of positives if the number of infected is increasing faster than the number of tests.
> if it is growing exponentially, you’d expect the number of people meeting the criteria to also grow exponentially.
I don't know for Japan, but here in Canada, on top of showing symptoms, we need to have taken an international flight, or be in contact with a known carrier. The number of people having taken a flight won't grow... that's for sure, and contact, well it's recursive at that point and depends on whether you were in contact with someone that has taken a flight, has shown symptoms, has taken the test instead of following the quarantine asked, and has been positive. So essentially in our case, the number of people meeting the criteria can only go down actually.
We would expect the number of people requiring hospitalization with symptoms to grow though. I don't know if that's enough to skip the criteria though, here in Quebec our number of death got lowered yesterday because the test came back negative...
It does makes sense though to keep theses criterias, because most case doesn't require hospitalization, and there's a very limited amount of test available. In Quebec it seems like we are now able to carry enough test for people with theses criterias, so with some luck, we will remove the contact criteria soon, and get a better picture of the propagation.
In South Korea 30% of the infected are in the 20-30 range, it's most probably the same everywhere but we just don't know it because they would most probably be asymptomatics.
the number of cases presenting themselves for testing follows the exponential curve. people are displaying symptoms in numbers following an exponential curve.
when the number of symtomatics become very large and saturate the testing process, the reporting will no longer follow the real curve of cases over time, only the number of test that can be performed over time.
[i meant to reply here | moved from previous reply below]