What am I missing here? I believe infection rate is defined as New Cases Today divided by Cumulative Total Cases Yesterday.
I use a 7 day moving average to compare the change in this rate. Here are some numbers:
March 7 48.6%
March 15 32.1%
March 23 38.5%
April 1 18.5%
April 8 10.4%
Trump issued his 15 day plan on March 15. The infection rate grew for the next 8 days to 38.5% and has declined daily since that date. A week is about how long it takes to realize you just might have the Coronavirus.
So you can argue that the rate was coming down naturally but arguing that the rate never changed is just nonsense.
And at the 10% rate we are finding 32,000 new cases every day. And that number is slowly increasing. And we are still under the Trump “quarantine”. That rate, which is falling needs to keep falling.
I show 8% but the new confirmed rate should go up as we get more testing which causes the fatality rate to drop. The increase in deaths rate is what you watch
What we don’t know is what the growth rate would have been had the measures not been implemented. It is not necessarily true that it would have remained constant or increased absent these measures. Any statement otherwise is just begging the question.
All disease outbreaks, despite all the panic about exponential growth, have followed more closely a logistic growth model. This is a model where initial growth rates are low, but increasing. The growth rate at some point reaches a peak and then begins to decline. That describes very well the path that the current outbreak has taken, as illustrated by the data you posted. Is the decline in growth rate really a result of the social distancing measures or is it just the natural course of the pandemic — that’s the question. I don’t have enough expertise to provide a real answer, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know definitively.