# why are deaths dropping but infection rate stabilizing? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [June 16, 2020, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779 "2020-06-16T15:38:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Ann\_Hedonia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ann_hedonia/32/319_2.png) [@Ann\_Hedonia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ann_Hedonia)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2020, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/141 "2020-07-17T15:38:47Z")
That article says that over 50% of the people THAT WENT TO A WALK-IN CLINIC AND REQUESTED A TEST got a positive result. I assume that everyone that walked into CityMD had a reason to assume that they had been infected. Given that Corona is a poor neighborhood, they probably had really good reason to expect that they’d been infected. The people in the more prosperous neighborhoods may simply have a lower bar for seeking a test. 50% positive under those circumstances does not suggest that there is the same rate of infection in the general population. Walk-in clinics like CityMD do a lot of testing and diagnosing of STD’s. If 50% of the people that thought they’d gotten a dose of the clap and went to CityMD for testing received a positive result, do you really think that suggests that 50% of the people in the neighborhood have gonorrhea? ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2020, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/142 "2020-07-17T15:44:58Z")
You are incorrectly using the term ‘spike’. If we have learned anything from the way infections and deaths accumulate, ‘spike’ is absolutely the wrong term. A spike implies sudden rise, but also a sudden fall and leads to the small comfort that once the peak has been reached then the worst is over and it will end very soon, and that is the wrong lesson to take from this. In every nation where that has been a visible significant wave we have seen a exponential increase with a long drawn out steady and persistently long decrease, during which time more people actually die than during the period of increase itself - furthermore - at any time during that long drawn out steady decrease there is the potential for the case rate to take off again and this in practice is exactly what has happened in US states that have reopened too early. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2020, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/143 "2020-07-17T15:57:02Z")
Here’s a graph of some of the bad countries in Europe: > **[An interactive visualization of COVID-19 | 91-DIVOC](https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=highlight-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left&extra=Spain%2CUnited%20Kingdom%2CFrance%2CItaly#countries-normalized)** > > An interactive, data-forward visualization of COVID-19 data by Prof. Wade at The University of Illinois. Updated daily. Looks like a spike to me. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2020, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/144 "2020-07-17T16:18:01Z")
Look at the gradient of the rise of deaths and infections, then compare with the gradient of of the fall of deaths and infections - or just add it up for yourself. Spain - takes 18 days to reach a peak, 60 more days to return to the same level Sweden - takes 36 days to peak, 80 more days and it still hasn’t declined to the same level European Union - takes 29 days to peak,80 more days to return to same level, and this one is quite useful because it pretty much aggregates all the EU nations and is more representative of the disease as a whole. Now to look at WHO Americas - first peak 27 days after intitial infections and then it flattens out for a time and is now starting to increase 90 days later. In other words, and by using your own cite, the evidence that it is not a spike it is, at the most optimistic a sawtooth shape and in the Americas is is at present a plateau however it is looking very much like this will be a climb whose magnitude we are not certain and whose rate we also are not certain - but an educated guess base on the pattern of rise and fall is that it will sharply increase even higher and then decline steadily. If you look at the worldmeters site and observe the bar charts for each nation, or district of state or region, you will observe this sawtooth pattern everywhere where the infection has been brought under any semblance of control. At the very best it takes around 3 times longer to decline than to rise, and in most nations the ratios is wider than that - hence these are not spikes - in engineering terms the curves resemble charge/discharge rates and is an entirely natural and predictable phenomenon - its a pattern observed almost everywhere. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2020, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/145 "2020-07-17T20:29:31Z")
> [@Tfletch1](#): > > … So if you live in butt fuck egypt where nobody likes each other, fine, your Ro is well below 1. Great. If you live in a fairly dense region where people socialize, then, yeah, an Ro of 2.5-3 is probably a reasonable estimate meaning, you’d have to reach 60-70% infected to reach herd immunity. Or you do at least the minimal of wearing masks and closing bars to get the Ro (or Re anyway) down for a long time. … I’d like to return to this to emphasize what we agree on. Reff varies. Based on being in Butt Fuck or the most crowded loud multigenerational conditions. We can also, I suspect agree that _k_ contributes to what Reff is in any particular location. The _k_ of COVID-19 is such that it is estimated that 10% of those infected are responsible for 80% of the spread, possibly having something to do with characteristics of particular super-spreader individuals, and definitely having to do the presence of super-spreader events (closed crowded loud being the trifecta). Thus clearly a neighborhood that has multiple generations of young to elderly adults all living in loud close quarters, will result in a higher Reff and will take a higher percent functionally immune to slow down spread than one that fewer sharing households and with plenty of space, plenty of time alone, and so on. Unless the latter includes people who normally live pretty isolated getting together for specific super-spreader events (like large funerals, B’Nai Mitzvot, megachurch services …) and then the other way fast. What’s the exact impact? Unclear. There are also the unknowns of how much non-specific immunity there is from past common cold causing HCoV infections, and how much children, especially those under 11, function as relative transmission dead ends. Reff would vary greatly with different inputs to those numbers. Reff for any specific region or even neighborhood may vary greatly based on these factors and more. It is completely possible that different neighborhoods in New York could have very different Reffs. And we really do not yet know enough to have any confidence in any statement of what percent infected will deliver herd immunity, not without accepting a bunch of big ifs. ---
**Author:** ![RealityCheck71](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitycheck71/32/3493_2.png) [@RealityCheck71](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityCheck71)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2020, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/146 "2020-07-17T20:46:45Z")
Ok, I see what you’re saying. ---
**Author:** ![Banquet\_Bear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banquet_bear/32/373_2.png) [@Banquet\_Bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banquet_Bear)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/147 "2020-07-19T00:31:04Z")
> [@casdave](#): > > In every nation where that has been a visible significant wave we have seen a exponential increase with a long drawn out steady and persistently long decrease, during which time more people actually die than during the period of increase itself …gosh, we saw that here but I didn’t actually think about it. We (NZ) only had 22 deaths: but most of them came in a big clump all at the same time as the other metrics were rapidly coming down. It was a real gut-punch: for the longest time we only had a single death, then the rest came over a series of days. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2020, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779/148 "2020-07-19T17:06:00Z")
@Tfletch1 you may particularly find [this article](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.29.174888v1.full.pdf+html) (which I’ve linked in a different thread as well) of interest. > [@](#): > > One sentence summary > SARS-CoV-2 induces robust memory T cell responses in antibody-seronegative and > antibody-seropositive individuals with asymptomatic or mild COVID-19. Sweden - so some here will dismiss it out of hand … And seriously to be taken as preliminary as the numbers are not huge, but still if real, and if those T-cells minimally provide protection from more severe disease if not infection (as expected) very important. Details. > [@](#): > > we quantified functional SARS-CoV-2-specific > memory T cell responses across five distinct cohorts, including healthy individuals who > donated blood either before or during the pandemic, family members who shared a > household with convalescent individuals and were exposed at the time of symptomatic > disease, and individuals in the convalescent phase after asymptomatic/mild or severe > COVID-19. We detected potentially cross-reactive T cell responses directed against > the membrane and spike proteins in healthy individuals who donated blood before the > pandemic, consistent with previous reports (Grifoni et al., 2020; Nina Le Bert, 2020), > but nucleocapsid reactivity was notably absent in this cohort (Figure 3A and S6A, > S6B). The highest response frequencies across all three proteins were observed in > convalescent individuals who experienced severe COVID-19. Progressively lower > response frequencies were observed in convalescent individuals with a history of > asymptomatic/mild COVID-19, exposed family members, and healthy individuals who > donated blood during the pandemic (Figure 3A) … > > … we assessed the recall capabilities of SARS-CoV-2- > specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in convalescent individuals, exposed family members, > and healthy blood donors. … Anamnestic responses > in the CD4+ and CD8+ T cell compartments, quantified as a function of CTVlow IFN-g+ > events (Figure 4A), were detected in most convalescent individuals and exposed family members (Figure 4B, C). SARS-CoV-2-specific CD4+ T cell responses were > proportionately larger overall than the corresponding SARS-CoV-2-specific CD8+ T cell > responses … > > … SARS-CoV-2-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses > were present in seronegative individuals, albeit at lower frequencies compared with > seropositive individuals (Figure 4F). These discordant responses were nonetheless > pronounced in some convalescent individuals with a history of asymptomatic/mild > COVID-19, exposed family members, and healthy individuals who donated blood > during the pandemic (Figure 4F and S8B, S8C), often targeting both the internal > (nucleocapsid) and surface antigens (membrane and/or spike) of SARS-CoV-2 (Figure > 4G). Potent memory T cell responses were therefore elicited in the absence or > presence of circulating antibodies … > > … almost twice as many exposed family members and healthy individuals who donated > blood during the pandemic generated memory T cell responses versus antibody > responses, implying that seroprevalence as an indicator has underestimated the extent > of population-level immunity against SARS-CoV-2. … Again, not huge sample sizes, and just as no one knows _for sure_ what Ab positivity does and does not mean, the same can be said for T-cell reactivity, so take with however many grains of salt you deem necessary: for the blood donors during the pandemic (individuals who donated blood at the Karolinska University Hospital in May 2020) 4/31 +Abs (13%) and 9/31 + T-cell response to both N and S or M (29%); of exposed family members 17/28 +Ab (61%) and 26/28 (93%) + T-cell response to both N and S or M. Interpret how you choose. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-deaths-dropping-but-infection-rate-stabilizing/855779.md?page=7)