The COVID-19 pandemic

[tomh009]

Median incubation period is estimated to be five days, so even if everyone got infected on the very last day of the vacation, half of them should have become symptomatic by March 13. And it's hard to imagine that they would have waited two weeks for a test.

https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/27628...y-reported

Quebec is now doing only the quick test at the hospitals, not the central one, so there should not be much delay in the results.

OK, so March 13 is probably a good bet; everyone symptomatic should be showing by March 18. I see that around then they had 48 hour turnarounds on tests. So the most recent week's bump is strange. The recent Quebec growth rate has also apparently not been exponential:

https://twitter.com/fagstein/status/1243225370494722048
https://twitter.com/fagstein/status/1243...36/photo/1

I think we need a couple more days of data to tell for sure.

Something that is odd is the Quebec recovered number is 2 while the NZ recovered number (out of 280 cases) is 27. Perhaps different definitions.

The last four days:
2020-03-23 ​​​ 628(+186%)
2020-03-24 ​​​ 1040(+66%)
2020-03-25 ​​​ 1339(+29%)
2020-03-26 ​​​ 1629(+22%)

The 23rd is where their process changed so a backlog was recorded. Number definitely not comparable.

Quebec City, Chaudiere, Monteregie and Estrie regions did not appear to clear their backlogs until the 24th, which accounts for maybe 150 cases. If we shift those to the 23rd we get this:
2020-03-23 ​​​ 778(+258%)
2020-03-24 ​​​ 1040(+34%)
2020-03-25 ​​​ 1339(+29%)
2020-03-26 ​​​ 1629(+22%)

This seems a bit more sensible, and the last three days are in the 20-30% range, which is definitely not good. They are running more tests (almost 20,000 in the last two days) but the positive test rate is fairly high at about 3%. But we'll know better after the weekend.

By comparison, Ontario has run only about 5,000 tests in those same two days. But I do believe all Ontario testing still needs to go through confirmation at the central lab.