Originally Posted by
Australopithecus
On today’s data we are back to an additional 4000 cases. If yesterday’s spike is factored in, the additional case numbers average out to around 4000/day for the last ten days or so. Which is itself an oversimplification. Why would the case numbers grow linearly?
Most drugs have a half life in the body; a period over which the concentration halves as the drug is metabolised and/or eliminated.
Yet we're surely all familiar with drink driving advice that the rate of elimination of alcohol from the body is roughly constant at about 0.01%BAC per hour, regardless of how drunk you are.
Why might this be? Why would alcohol level fall linearly?
The answer to both your question and mine is of course that the factor being measured has hit some sort of maximum capacity. Ethanol metabolism has a limited capacity regardless of blood alcohol level.
Confirmed diagnosis rates are quite possibly also limited by the capacity to test and diagnose. If you've got more probable cases than you can test, then you're probably getting a very high rate of confirmed cases, with total confirmed numbers more representative of your capacity to test, not the actual rate of infection.
And indeed the recent spike in reported infections was apparently about a broadening of the diagnostic criteria to capture more actual infections at the cost of certainty by RNA testing that none were false positives.