The Flu Hypothesis: Part II
In my previous piece for this site, I floated what I called “the flu hypothesis”. My idea was to treat COVID-19 like the flu to predict how it might behave. From here, we could get a sense of how Government policy might respond. This was based on the assumption that the Government policies did not really have any impact on the trajectory of the disease. So, whether the Government response ended up looking like a success or failure all depended on how the virus behaved on its own terms. What I found was that there were two types of flu season. One was more ‘gradual’. It tended to rise slowly at the start of the year, through January and February and into March. The other type was sharper and more ‘aggressive’. This type of flu season tended to spike early, around the first week of January and burn out quicker. Since the Government launched its lockdown policy at the start of January, I pointed out that if COVID-19 behaved like a ‘gradual’ flu season the policy would look like a failure. If, on the other hand, COVID-19 behaved like a more ‘aggressive’ flu season then it would look like it was the Government causing the decline due to their policy How did things turn out? The best data to look ...
