Revisiting the Assessed Peak

Earlier this month, I had written a post in which I made the case that the DC region was hitting its peak of new COVID-19 cases, specifically on the dates of 10 and 11 April 2020. While I stand by the methodology which I employed in making that post, the recent data has clearly indicated that DC region indeed did not hit a peak at that time (or it did hit a peak, but it was only momentary and ultimately moot).

For about a week after the alleged peak, new cases were coming in around 800 per day, which I considered might be constituting a plateau. However in the past few days, new cases have risen above 900, then 1,000, and now over 1,200.


I'm leery of offering detailed speculation as to why we have witnessed the recent rise in new daily cases, because to do that would require me to get into epidemiological explanations which I'm not qualified to offer; even in the aforementioned blog post discussing the possible regional peak, I was getting a bit outside of my comfort zone.

However, it is probably fair to say that the increases generally can be attributable to one of two reasons:

1) More people are being infected
2) More testing capacity allows greater identification of those who were already sick

The percentage increase in cases has consistently remained below 10% since early April, and the doubling time remains over 11 days.




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