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Comment by jboggan | Hacker News Reader

Because the IHME model is based on taking China's data at 100% face value and applying it to the US. It over-predicts in the short term and under-predicts in the medium to long term. They keep revising the overall number down to line up with an epidemic peak in 3-4 days in the US, which is ridiculous.

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The reason why the epidemic peak is estimated so soon is that New York has the bulk of the cases and they began bringing new cases under control before most of the rest of the nation.

Dig into state by state numbers and most states are after that with lower peaks. See https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america and then https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/new-... to verify.

Does anyone else think NY called their peak prematurely? It seems like there's some periodicity in the data and there's always a slight two day drop every 7 days. This makes sense since many people are still working mon-fri in the city.

This is for NYC specifically (last few days of data are incomplete): https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

I wouldn't be surprised if NY continued surging in the coming days.

Also, I wonder, could there be any effect of a population decrease from an exodus from NYC?

So the assumption here is that New York will be the last big outbreak in the US.

The actual assumption is that with current social distancing, any outbreak will die down on its own on approximable dynamics. There is good evidence that this is so.

When we end social distancing, all bets are off. See http://www.healthdata.org/covid/faqs#length%20of%20the%20epi... to see that they are painfully aware of this and are explicitly not trying to model that.

All right, that seems much more reasonable to me. Thought you said the peak for the USA in general was imminent, and that's not at all obvious given that the social distancing policies going forward have yet to be decided.

It might be the case, but that assumes that effective measures to control the epidemic will keep being applied everywhere.

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