WHEN WILL THIS END? (a look at the latest research out from USC)

There's been a lot of data flying back and forth.

Every University has a "model". Every health official. Everybody on Twitter who in their spare time became a pandemic expert. Every government official is using different models.

PhDs are coming up with one model in the morning and changing their mind by afternoon.

Let's look at some of the models out there.

The White House has been making policy decisions based on a model coming out of University of Washington. You can find details at covid19.healthdata.org.

This model is being used to predict potential hospitalizations state by state. This model was considered the standard.

What did they predict and were they right?

----

Six days ago...six days ago...they projected that by April there would be 50,000 hospitalizations in NYC by April 1. They assumed social distancing.

Number of hospitalizations in NYC is not 50,000. It's 12,000. See graphic below from their model. 

I can understand a bunch of PhDs being off by 10% or 20% in six days but there are 1/4 the number of hospitalizations they projected.

They are massively wrong in research published just six days ago.

They assumed only exponential growth.

Something only has exponential growth when there are no boundaries. Eventually, if there are boundaries, then the growth stops being exponential, starts to flatten, and then starts to go down.

What are the boundaries to this virus?

Population, demographics, immune populations, the amount of exposure different groups have to the virus, possible mutations, possible weather effects, we don't really know.

---

There's one paper I found which takes much of this into account.

They look at how many times the deaths have doubled in each country.

In other words, they tried to figure out how exponential this virus really is.

The paper is by Gerard Tellis of USC, and it is titled: "How Long Will Social Distancing Last?" Here is a link to it:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3562996

No other paper that I have looked at has taken all of the new data into account to model the exponential growth. To be fair, this is because until now the data wasn't there.

It was possible to make a guess based on China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Sweden, and even Italy and now Spain. But guesswork is not good enough for an academic paper.

Attached is the main table in the paper to focus on.

Based on the data so far in locations that are still "pending", they can extrapolate and figure out roughly when a location will hit its peak and when the virus cases will start going down quickly.

In Spain, for instance, they forecast a peak today.

Just eyeing the data at

www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

you can maybe guess that Spain's growth ended about a week ago but it's still been volatile. The USC model predicts today as the peak and April 14 when the virus is fully under control.

In New York, they estimate April 5 with fully under control around April 22. These are only estimates and can vary a little bit.

Of course, expect data to look bad until the peak is hit.

But look at the Spain chart at the site mentioned above and you will see an example of what the curve looks like when a peak is probably being hit.

What does this all mean?

- it means social distancing is key until the virus is under control

- it means that there is an end to this pandemic sooner rather than later.

- it also might mean that "social distancing" and "total economic shutdown" are not the same thing.

You can carefully open up the economy and still has social distancing (as they have done in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Sweden.)

The stimulus is going to be great. But the stimulus only works if the economy is OPEN.

Else, you are giving electric shock to a patient that's already dead. It's useless. When the time is right, the economy needs to be brought back to life.