First came the exponential growth of coronavirus. What happens after it peaks?
Cases of coronavirus have exponentially grown throughout the United States, just as experts warned they would.
But now the good news — with the U.S. nearing its coronavirus peak, cases and deaths could decrease just as sharply as they grew.
Crediting “aggressive social distancing,” the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday night on CNN the worst could be near in the U.S.
“I think we’re coming to the peak ... we can see the other side of the curve,” Robert Redfield said.
Confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. exponentially grew from 1,300 on March 10 to 53,700 March 23 to 161,800 March 29 and now 461,400 as of April 10, Johns Hopkins University data shows. The country now has more confirmed cases than Spain, Italy and France — the three countries with the next most confirmed coronavirus cases — do combined.
And while COVID-19 won’t taper off overnight, there is room for optimism because of exponential decay.
“Since the number of new cases also depends on the number of infectious people (which declines as folks recover), that will also be exponential, but exponentially decreasing,” according to Seth Shostak, a scientific researcher at SETI Institute.
Exponential decay is defined as “whenever something is decreasing or shrinking rapidly as a result of a constant rate of decay applied to it,” according to Basic-Mathematics.com.
“As the infected ether recover or, in the worst-case scenario, pass away, either way they will fail to transmit the disease further along,” according to educational site The Great Courses Daily.
The downward slope of an exponential decay curve would likely mirror the exponential growth curve already seen throughout the U.S.
But don’t stop social distancing just yet. There is one major caveat related to the coronavirus curve, MDmetrix CEO Warren Ratliff told GeekWire.
“The number of reported new cases is tied to the availability of testing,” he said. “So, a ‘signal’ regarding the number of new cases might represent a flattening of the new-case curve but it could also reflect testing limitations.”
MDmetrix has tracked each state’s daily deaths from coronavirus and said Thursday none of the states with the highest COVID-19 related deaths have flattened their curves.
“Let’s just hope that by invoking shelter-in-place and other strategies, we can reduce the infection rate and cause the inevitable bell-shape curve of the number that are stick to turn over,” according to Shostak of the SETI Institute.
This story was originally published April 10, 2020 at 11:07 AM with the headline "First came the exponential growth of coronavirus. What happens after it peaks?."