What an interesting week.
First, on the 23rd, Boris Johnson fully reversed its original plan to obtain herd immunity and announced a home lockdown, affecting every single activity other than those deemed essential. However, the list of “essencial services” is long and wide. From telecommunications to groceries, a significant part of the economy and the associated workforce will still be out of home every single day.
Second, and this is where things get interesting, it’s already known how long it takes for the people getting from sick to dead: 16 days. This means that, when Boris announced the lock down, 335 people had already perished, but because of this delay, 9252 will also not survive until this lock down takes effect. This effect was already confirmed in Spain and Italy, and it does’t even has a relation with the real IFR or CFR. It’s just caused but the fact the current trend can only be altered by measures, and none was taken before.
What actually happens right after those 16 days have passed? No one knows. Italy will make its 16th day on the 31st. Then we’ll know.
Third, Public Health England recognised it could not keep track of all the active cases, by not updating the number of recovered cases. Know, on the Covid-19 dashboard, one can read “A new process for collecting numbers of recovered patients is in development: the figure shown is for 22/03/2020″. How can you plan ahead, if you don’t even know how many of the ones you actually know are infected, still are?
On the forecast model, things have also alined a bit. So yes, we may not know many infected people, but what do know (or hope we do) is how many have perished. This information alone allow us to forecast ahead as the evolution of the deceased follows almost exactly the same curve as the infection itself. The “almost” is a dependency of the response capability of the health system, and whether is was overwhelmed.
As such, we now added the the forecast error, in order for us also to measure how successful the model is.
For the 31st, we can expect around 1524 cumulative deaths and 20693 cumulative infections, although this value is now all but useless.
As usual the source spreadsheet is available here.