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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's probably worth comparing NY to Madrid, for a counter-example of what could have happened if lockdown had been ended earlier.

There's a really good FT article on this here: https://www.ft.com/content/b9653470-8779-4037-86ad-96edfcd6f...

Overall, Madrid opened much quicker and is now in the grip of another outbreak.

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If you count cases by specimen date (when they were taken) and not by reporting date (when the results were known), the picture is a little different: while high, cases seem (too early to be sure) to have plateaued around the end of August.

See https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/spains-outbreak-updated-on-reg... for some discussion (two weeks old though, so beware).

Hmmm, interesting. Its very difficult to make comparisons with wave 1 though, as we presumably had the same number of asymptomatics, but with the much lower levels of testing, we didn't find any of them.

The third wave will probably be a lot easier to model (god, I wish I was joking on that).

I find this talk of first/second wave misleading. This is not the flu for mortality, and it is not an influenza virus. It spreads differently.

Some people at my institution in fact have argued that you should not use flu-derived models, but instead model the spread and the outbreaks in similar ways to SARS and MERS, which rather than big "waves", had a series of spaced outbreaks. At an internal seminar they showed that at least their models for the Bergamo area seemed to be consistent with the actual data.

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