The Easter and Passover Blip in New York City

Maximilian Vierlboeck; Roshanak R Nilchiani; Christine M Edwards

The figures 6 through 9 on the next two pages demonstrate the effects that short outbursts can have and a few takeaways have to be mentioned and pointed out. First, a return to the effective contact rates of a "normal" state can increase the infection rates temporarily by 980% as the first day with increased effective contact rates amplifies the second one. This is due to the decrease in between those two dates not being sufficient for the measures to fight back the short upswing in a limited time. Therefore, these two increases could yield hundreds of thousands of new infections and thus could also even double the number of hospitalized patients. Second, in the long run, these short increases in effective contact rates can have detrimental impacts when it comes to the fatality numbers as a result of the increased hospitalizations. In the worst case, this could lead to an increase in fatality numbers of 60% after 90 days, not taking into consideration that hospitals might be overloaded and forced into triage procedure where limited resources have to be allocated and decisions have to be made which patients can receive treatments at all.