Estimation of SARS-CoV-2 Infection Prevalence in Santa Clara County

Steve Yadlowsky; Nigam Shah; Jacob Steinhardt

One question that comes up from these analyses is when would we expect the number of infections to plateau after the shelter-in-place order, if the order were to stop or reduce the spread to below exponential growth. Such an order should immediately affect the number of infections that we projected here, so that the number of infections does not grow beyond that of March 17th, and starts to dwindle after the 14-21 day course of the virus infection. However, because of the lag between infection and hospitalization, we expect the number of new hospitalizations to continue to increase for another 12 days. The lag time varies between 3 and 12 days 1 , therefore, we would expect to see a slight change in rate of increase of hospitalizations in about 1 week from March 17th; the number of hospitalizations will still continue to increase and only the rate of increase will slow. Due to such large variance in the . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.