We just had a very good day of news in Newfoundland and Labrador regarding COVID-19, and I felt like rambling about it a little bit in a place where I know most of you are very statistically literate.
We just announced our heaviest day of testing to date, and turned up one case. Previous 7 days gave us 4, 5, 2, 0, 2, 2, 4, going backwards in order. For context, in late March we were adding up to 32 cases a day.
On April 8, the provincial government released projections on the growth of the virus, using a best-case R0 of 1.5, and a worst-case R0 of 3, showing a probable peak in active cases in June or November, respectively. I don't have all the information about how they arrived at these figures, but if my head-math is correct, going from a handful of travelers in mid March to 200 cases at the time of the projection is consistent with a growth rate of R0=1.5 if we assuming generations to take an average of 5 days.
Except the virus didn't multiply consistently at all. Some time on the weekend of March 15th, someone infected with COVID-19 attended a funeral and hugged everybody. This was a couple of days before our schools shut down, my work sent everyone home, and everyone started getting their food delivered. I played a beer league game that weekend, and while I felt antsy doing it, there was no obvious risk in doing so because nobody in our group traveled and there were no publicized cases in the province on that day. Now, 177 people, or over 70% of the cases in our province can be traced directly to that funeral.
So I'm not sure how many people actually contracted COVID-19 at the funeral home, and how many of those 175 are a generation or more away from that incident, but it's fair enough to say that the number of people that the average carrier infects while our province is in lockdown should not include someone who infected anywhere from 25, 50, 100 people while the province was not in lockdown.
IF the official numbers are anything close to a representative proxy for the growth of the disease here, then COVID-19 is dying out in Newfoundland under our current conditions (though not fast enough to celebrate about anything). Going back to the beginning of April, we have 64 new cases in the first 5 days, 19 new cases in the next 5 days, 7 cases in the next 5 days, and 10 cases in the last 3 while doubling our daily tests. That's a terrible sample size to draw any conclusions from, but that's not what would happen if every one of those people infected an average of 1.5 people within 5 days. It's more like one of every 2 people infecting anyone at all.
So we have to contend with the fact that we're not catching all of the cases, and we don't know how many people actually have the virus. The fact that our numbers have bumped a bit over the past few days as we move from testing only travelers, serious cases, health care workers and people who attended that funeral clusterf***, to now testing anyone with a dry cough, shows that there's more to uncover.
I think our numbers were closer to accurate in late March when we were dealing with that funeral. The simple logic is that there could have been twice as many COVID-19 cases before that, and twice as many now, but it's highly unlikely there was an identical but entirely separate fiasco just like that funeral that happened at the exact same time and went totally unnoticed. Unfortunately that means that if you assume that there are 100 unknown active cases right now to add to the 65 currently fighting the disease, then the spread hasn't declined as fast as suggested above. It might even be rising slightly. We'll have a better idea of that if we keep testing like we have for the last couple of days, but there are still other variables.
Some people have suggested that death and hospitalization rates are the best way to predict the actual size of an individual outbreak, and that's more great news for Newfoundland. 1.56% of our settled cases ended in death, and 9.23% of our active cases are in hospital. That's really, really low, and if we do indeed have another 200-300 people blissfully unaware they have a coronavirus, then the real fatality rate for this thing could be way lower than we think it is. The most likely scenario is that we've caught the majority of cases that have been here within a week or so of them popping up, but there are still more strays than anyone should be comfortable with, and that it'll still be weeks before we're likely to be turning up goose eggs day after day despite testing our arses off.
Anyway, this sucks, but my job, my partner, my cat, my art and music, and you guys have made this as good a month as I could possibly expect. I hope my island can kill the motherf***er dead, and I hope we don't make any hasty decisions and take the recovery slowly. Not every jurisdiction has the luxury of presenting such easily graspable numbers - cases in the hundreds, only a handful identified before our lockdown. But if we do manage to beat this earlier than most, it'll provide a valuable statistical study of how it moves, and how it lives and dies.
I can finally teach after having been laid off without pay since Feb. 21st. Yeah, I had to accept $500 a month less pay (biz is at 40% of preCOVID19 level) but at least I can teach, stay in my free apartment and get an income. That half a thou a month i lose is no biggie since i usually used it for traveling, a hobby i won't be doing over the next 12 months i expect anyways.
