When will USA & Other Countries Open for Business due to the Coronavirus

Drafted 12th April

This is a question that many people will be asking, and each country will have to make their decisions on when they will resume business again and how they will manage this process.

My prediction made some weeks ago now was that countries will open up prior to the virus being under control (again this is subjective to different points of view what they class under control, is this just a reduction in new cases or deaths or is it no new cases).

This article will be based on the USA statistical information due to too much data to analyze on a globally basis; however, all other countries can use the same principle and analysis as what I have made in this article.

USA have already made predictions that when they would go back to work, this has been stated as 12 April and sometime in Early May. It is not sure how this prognosis has been made except, “they seem very nice dates to open up”.

With the above said, I think we can do better than this, and use a little science to analysis information to obtain a better indication of when will be a good time to open for business. Being an engineer, as most, we are not subjective to guess work this is not an option, and real information is required to make informed decisions. That said I also believe we should state that it is fair that no one really knows the answer to this as there are too many variants that can happen (humans issues mainly) but is a perfect situation we can get some close estimates.

I have redeveloped the chart above which gives 3 main statistical information as outlined below.

This analysis has been made over 57 days only 15th February to 12th April. I did not take it from the first case identified 20 January due to the low numbers of infected cases. On the 15 February the number of infected cases was 15 nationwide and remained at this for some days and then slowly started to increase day by day and only very slowly at first then started to accelerate around 6th Match from 296 to 401 the following day, first date 100 new confirmed cases a day had been reported.

The above Graph lays out the data as follows.

1.     Total Number of Infected people to Date

2.     Presently Infected people to date

3.     Recovered people to date

There are several important factors of information that can be gathered from this as outlined below.

1.     Recovery Rate

Notice how low the recovery rate compared infected people it is very low – 9.79%

This graph shows that the infected persons are not recovered for approximately around 3 weeks after infection so there is a long lag before recovery (the official figure for recover is approximately 2 weeks to 6 weeks pending severity of illness)

 This tells us that there is still going to be a large number of infected persons in another 3 weeks

 2.     Active Infect Cases;

From the active cases you can see this is still very high, and as previously stated will take at least 3 weeks from the recently infected cased to recover. If we are optimistic then by 1 May there will be still around 400,000 active cases. This is not taking into consideration of newly infected cases going forward.

 3.     Current Rate of infection

The graph below shows the daily number of new cases reported and it appears from the graph that the peak has been reached. It must be cautioned though that several more days of data are required to have a better understanding in the slope of the downward trend.   This graph is the main indicator that most people are working to as to when it may be possible to open up again. Realistically business should not be opening us as long as new cases are identified as we already have experience how fast and contagious this Virus is as in a matter of 3 weeks we have seen approximately 550,000 cases in the USA.

With the above graph being the main indicator of when the USA is likely to open up let’s take a closer view of this from the just after the peak from the past 5 days data and see how projections are looking in a linear manner to zero infections.

 See the following graph of daily infections per day just after the peak which only has 5 days of data.

With a liner projection the very earliest that could be achieved zero new cases is around 5th May however this is extremely unlikely as it’s based on perfect conditions which we do not have. We can expect that we shall still see new infections well into June due to the number of new infections still being recorded daily, which is over 25,000 new cases presently. In addition it is likely this curve will be less aggressive than the infection rate.

Over the course of the next 7 days we shall start to see better trending of likely projections, however caution just a couple of days of increase will greatly increase the zero infection rate date.  

  4.     Projected Active Cases

From the graph of the active cases I have made a liner projection on the numbers of active cases based on the number of cases day by day. It you take a look at the dotted line we can see the Active cased around the beginning of May is likely to be around 400,000. This would be conservative if we take two things into consideration

                          i.         The slow buildup of inspected numbers from February to mid-January which has lowered the number

                         ii.         The fact that we have not taken into consideration of any new cases.

 One factor that will assist to correct the number the number of infected numbers should start to decrease over the next couple f weeks, however this will not diminish the number of infected cases by the end of April.

 In Conclusion

The USA will not be opening up for work for at least a couple of months and probably more depending on their exit strategy (see the proviso below, “Likely Scenario’s”). If they want to achieve no new infections.

It is hard to see that there will not be new infections for some months due to the high number of active cases, as this will cause additional new cases to health workers and then into the community. It is much more likely that this will be closer to at least 6 months but it is unlikely this virus is going away unless the USA permanently keep their doors shut to the rest of the world and can discipline safe distancing which both are unlikely even though the authorities are trying this, similar to other countries.

Likely Scenario’s

This is very likely going to be applicable to many countries not just the USA.

With the number of infected people and difficulty in being able to contain and reduce their numbers, it is inevitable that countries will start to introduce exit strategies meaning imposing or maintaining restrictions on social distancing and opening up certain sectors of industry and by additional protection methods to those more at risk, plus building a more robust medical infrastructure, testing and of course quarantine. Other factors that may be taken into consideration is age of workers i.e. those in their 20's and 30's that while still may be vulnerable to catching the disease are much more likely to recover quickly with minor symptoms. One other factor that will be considered are those with antibodies to the virus, i.e. those that may have already contracted it and have recovered and their resistance will be stronger.

Eventually there may be a vaccine to prevent the virus from spreading, however that is not likely going to be before 12 to 18 months. With still the worst to come in other countries especially in overcrowded third world countries where the virus is just starting to get hold this virus is here to stay for a long time and again is likely to spread back to countries that are under control. While countries will start to control the virus given enough time will their economies be able to survive without relaxing stringent lock downs, I very much doubt it except for a few. It will be expected that countries will open up before zero new cases. 

Economic Impact

The economic impact caused by the Caronavirus will make the Financial Crisis of 2008 look like a hiccup. The difference between the two, the first mainly impacted the banking and financial institutes but in general everyone carried on as normal, they still had jobs for the most.

With this crises the unemployment will be enormous, business will go out of operation for good. With the rate of unemployment this will affect everyone even that large companies as their revenues will be impacted and shrink and will also make retrenchments. As for the Fed will they have now enough income with 20 to 40% unemployment not paying taxes???

In the end each Government will have to review their own economic situation but I expect the weaker economies initially will start to relax measure to get their economies going.

The decision will be “Is the Cure worst that the Disease”??, time will tell and it will be interesting to see how each country manages their own situation.

What the USA will do is just unpredictable!