Will They Ever Let Us Reopen the Country?

Let start with the answer: I have grave doubts that any of the blue governors will reopen their states in the next two months.  I truly hope that this is not due to them wanting the economy to completely collapse (and thereby hurting the president's chances for re-election), but I do not believe they are above such heartless calculations (and who cares how many people that might kill, they would still blame the president).  But now, with the political machinations covered, let's talk about how they can (will?) rationalize such policies.

First,  there are two conditions 'needed to reopen', a 14 day period of a downward trend in the confirmed cases and sufficient testing to be able to track and test.  I believe these two conditions are diametrically opposed.  The reason I believe this is that with increasing testing comes increasing positive tests (you see what you measure).  Can we demonstrate this?   Well let's see...

Consider the data for confirmed cases (= positive tests) vs day diagnosed for San Diego County.  The plot (available here) shows that after two weeks of cases below 100/day (April 5-April 19), we have suddenly seen a return to numbers over 100 (and the two biggest single day counts of the entire period).  Is this due an increase in the spread of the virus or is there another reason behind the counts increasing?  Well the county has helpfully also included a plot of the number of tests reported by date (available here).  Notice that the number of tests reported is also higher of late.  Someone who wants to see if the case increase is simply due to the test increase merely needs to either 1) plot the number of positive cases/day vs the number of tests reported/day and see if the numbers are correlated or 2) plot the rate of positive cases by day and see if these appear uncorrelated.  The two plots below are what you get for these (note that the data prior to March 21 shows a markedly higher rate of positive cases, much higher than remainder of the data, and a particularly small number of tests, so as to not obscure the relationship I have shown the data from March 21 onward).

  

The plot on the left is the number of positive test vs the total tests, while the plot on the right is the fraction of positive tests by date.

To me the plot on left shows a fairly strong positive correlation and the plot on the right looks like noise but with some non-zero average value.  The slope on the left is 0.623 (note this is not the standard least squares line, but rather is the line you get by a least squares fit where the intercept is forced to the origin - zero tests must yield zero positive results).  The average value for the fraction of positive cases is 0.069 +/- 0.001.  These are in sufficient agreement that I claim that the positive cases reported is strongly influenced by the total number of tests (and will tend to about 1/15th of the total tests).  This means that as the testing increases we will see an increasing number of positive tests.  This is unavoidable!  Hence, we will never meet both criteria.

If it will, in fact, be nearly impossible to see decreasing cases with increasing testing we should ask what will happen if the country won't reopen until we see a decrease (from presumably actually having the virus go through the population).  If the data above is an accurate reflection of reality (vice the far worse possibility that the tests have a false positive rate of 6%), then at any one time we have steadily had about 1/15th of the population infected with active virus.  If this is the stable rate in the locked down economy, and if the infections tend to last 10 days, then it will take something like 90 days to run through enough of the population (~50%)  to really see the cases start to wane, and something like twice that to be starved out of possible hosts.  We simply can not maintain this lock down that long.

I see no reasonable path forward, that is based on actual current data, other than begin a prompt reopening of the majority of the economy as per my post of April 19 and this much better written description of the same thing by someone who actually has credentials.

Aside #1: There was also a statement by that waste of oxygen, also known as the WHO, that it may not be the case that getting the virus and then recovering would provide immunity from future infection.  Well if that's the case, the lock down is a waste of time and we are all truly f****d.  If it is just another case of them trying to make everything look worse, then all the more reason to confine the WHO to the trash heap of history, where it belongs.

Aside #2: Speaking of just "trying to make things worse", I also wonder if the way the CDC keeps redefining how to count cases (and deaths) will also make the cases continue to rise.  The reason I could see the CDC doing this is that they want to make things look as bad as possible (just like the WHO), in order to make their early models less inaccurate.  They need something like that to happen or no one will take them seriously on future predictions.  I hope that isn't the case, but I have to look at all possibilities.