Quote:
Originally Posted by O.city
Is there a chance the Ro is like 4.5 or 5 and it was just passed along with all the asymptomatic people for a while and we didn’t know what we were actually looking at these past few months?
|
Highly doubtful if you look at excess deaths in some of the regions of Italy. Bergamo was something like +450%, and many others were +250-280%. Anything that causes deaths to be that much higher than baseline with an average symptomatic onset of a few days and death within 8-14 days would have been causing deaths sooner (and a massive increase in hospitalizations as well).
In addition to R0, there is also the serial interval, which is the measurement of how long it takes someone to transmit the disease to everyone they infect, which is somewhere around 5 days according to a paper in NEJM.
If you have an R of 5 with a serial interval of 5, then after three generations a single person will have infected, on average, 125 people after 15 days and 15625 people after 30 days. That seems...high.