False Dawn

First, there was 1 case. A week later, there were 10. Then 100 and 1,000 the following two weeks. If it wasn't for the draconian shut down of Portugal, we would be at 10,000 by now. However, we are no longer seeing a tenfold in cases every week. That now takes two weeks. The peek of the outbreak has been pushed into the future. But it is still the case that we will not see any herd immunity before about 60% of the population has had the flu. If the government declares victory too early, there will be a spike in cases.

With 10,000,000 people, Portugal needs 6,000,000 (60%) cured cases before we can safely return to our old routines. This will be about three weeks after the peek of about 2,000,000 (20%) sick people, which in turn is one or two weeks after we see 200,000 (2%) cases. The sensible thing to do is therefore to stay low for at least three weeks after we reach 200,000 cases, because it is in the period after this milestone is reached that the vast majority of people will be infected. The trick is therefore to estimate when we are at 200,000 cases.

With a lot of people getting this flu without much in the way of symptoms, and a lot of people simply weathering it out at home, we may have to multiply the official figures by as much as ten to get at the true figures. In that case, we'll have to keep our eyes open for the announcement of 20,000 (0.2%) official cases. This number will be announced at, or shortly before, the date when the actual number of cases reach 200,000 (2%).

If the government declares victory before we have an official count of at least 200,000 (2%) cases, we're being misled. The number of cases will explode shortly after such a premature announcement.

The responsible thing to do is therefore to stock up with essentials and keep a minimum social interaction lifestyle from the date that government either admits to 20,000 (0.2%) official cases, or declare victory, whichever comes first, until tree weeks later when the worst of the outbreak should be over, and herd immunity has been established.

By Dan Kernler - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link