People stop very fast when people they know start to get sick and die.
Current measured growth rates are closer to 15% per day (5 day doubling time). And people's behavior changes not when people die, but when people get sick. Which happens (depending on your sensitivity) only 1-2 weeks after exposure.
But the basic principle still applies. We are trying to buy as much time as we can to ramp up emergency provisions. And are trying to avoid overwhelming emergency rooms. By the time people's behavior modifies through direct experience, it is too late.
Making this concrete I live in Orange County, CA. Population, 3.3 million. Hospital beds, 6600 (source https://www.hasc.org/orange-county). I don't know how many ICU beds, but https://www.accjournal.org/journal/view.php?number=630 suggests it likely is about 6% of the total. So about 400ish.
Now walk that backwards. 400 people in ICU beds probably means 4000 people with symptoms means less than 0.1% of the population with COVID. Except that it is worse than that. We have those beds for normal stuff that goes wrong. They aren't actually empty now.
Long story short, we start piling up excess dead bodies due to lack of capacity long before most of us personally know anyone who actually shows symptoms.
Citation needed. In the US, via Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...
2020-03-17 5656 infected 96 dead
2020-03-19 11980 infected 172 dead
Italy dead:
2020-03-16 1809
2020-03-19 3405
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I...
Netherlands dead:
2020-03-16 24
2020-03-19 76
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...
So "the risky hack" this article is about buys one not more than 3 days under the circumstances.
Speed of deaths is a good indicator because the number of those who die and those who need an intensive care unit are very close.
A lot of countries aren't able to test as much as it would be needed, so the number of "verified cases" which have less serious symptoms tends to be lower than the actual numbers. But those who die and could have been exposed to the virus and have matching symptoms are more consistently tested.
Main point: the US data can't be considered in vacuum, we know much more than US was able to test due to their botched procedures. But across the world, it's nowhere 5 days, as soon as the number of dead is more than a single digit.
Measuring what is going on by confirmed cases measures ramping out of testing more than the actual growth of the virus. Death figures are likely to be more accurate. But note that we expect it to take 3 weeks before quarantines show up in fatality figures. (A week for exposed to get sick, 2 more weeks before they die.) Therefore Italy shouldn't yet see the benefits of quarantines.
topic of which isn't the evaluation of the recorded growth across the world, but to show that lax measures are problematic even using the slower growth rates.
They specifically write just:
"Infection was assumed to be seeded in each country at an exponentially growing rate (with a doubling time of 5 days) from early January 2020, with the rate of seeding being calibrated to give local epidemics which reproduced the observed cumulative number of deaths in GB or the US seen by 14th March 2020."
That's what they use in their model to demonstrate the point.
They never claim it's accurate or quote any sources for that number, because they just use that very "optimistic" value for the demonstration purposes: to show that even with that number, it's not reasonable not to implement serious measures. That's how mathematical proofs are constructed: you construct the lowest bound which doesn't have to be accurate, just to be obviously lower than the actual numbers, and show that even then some assumption doesn't hold.
I'm claiming here that that is not a "current measured rate."
> But note that we expect it to take 3 weeks before quarantines show up in fatality figures.
That's why I've stated about Italy: "they started to quarantine municipalities since February 22." It's not that they let it waiting for "herd immunity" like UK or NL. It was less than 4 weeks ago.
2020-02-22 2 dead
2020-03-19 3405 dead
That's the Italian "current measured rate" for a month now.
References such as https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... have used a doubling time of about 5 days. As https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans... points out, studies of what happened in Wuhan suggest a real doubling time of about 6 days.
There are admittedly a lot of question marks about everyone's numbers.
Previously it has been communicated that 99% of deaths are to people with existing health problems.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
There are two people in my life I expect to die of the virus: my sister who is in her late 20s, with a lifetime history of Anorexia/Bulimia, who is currently in stage 5 kidney failure. Secondly my Aunt, a lifetime smoker, who currently has terminal lung cancer.
Both of these people, speaking personally, are going to die sometime this year. Will their deaths be accounted against the Coronavirus death toll or to their underlying conditions?
Is there any point to shutting down everything for 18+ months so that they can live another few months, doing so under lockdown conditions and general panic, with nobody able to visit them? And at the end of it all, many of the people who care for them will be unemployed.