Lockdown, math or Mother Nature? Differing views on why virus declining
Government action had nothing to do with the country’s success in the battle against the novel coronavirus, according to MK Ofer Shelah (Yesh Atid-Telem).
“Clearly, this virus behaves in a way that is related to weather, genetics and especially the age of each country’s inhabitants,” he said Wednesday at the Knesset.
Shelah is chairman of the Knesset Coronavirus Committee.
While there could be any number of reasons for the recent decline, it could just be “a normal distribution,” according to Ran Namerode, chairman of Redworth Capital Group, which focuses on global real estate, medical devices, movies productions and more.
COVID-19 has a periodicity of a classic Gaussian bellcurve shape wherever it appears, he told The Jerusalem Post.
In probability theory, the Gaussian distribution is a continuous function that approximates the exact binomial distribution of events.
“This bell’s life cycle is around six to eight weeks, with its peak appearing after about two or four weeks from the time when incidents begin to occur at a substantial rate,” Namerode said.
In Israel, the disease first appeared in substantial numbers around March 10. The peak arrived on April 2, when the country had 765 new cases in 24 hours. Then, as Namerode predicted in a Post article in March, it began to decline to only a few new cases per day toward the end of April.
The World Health Organization has reported accumulated numbers of coronavirus cases in the world since the onset of the pandemic, and the numbers therefore
appear to be constantly growing, Namerode said. However, if one looks at the pandemic by state or territory, the pattern is consistent in every one, and the virus begins to decline after around four weeks, he added.
“The first cases of morbidity in Hubei, China, appeared in late November,” Namerode said. “But a daily rate of 100 cases began around January 20. In mid-February, the daily rate reached thousands. However, by March 6, it dropped back to about 100 cases per day and has been continuously declining since then.”
“Within seven weeks the disease appeared, peaked and was suppressed almost completely,” he said. “When we talk about the end of the pandemic, what I mean is around 100 or 200 cases per day. These numbers do not represent a challenge to any health system. When the level has declined to these numbers, it is the end of the disaster.”