LogFAQs > #941838822

It's a combination of knowing how the disease progresses and what testing infrastructure was through March. Symptoms begin 2-14 days after contracting it, and then infection turns severe (if it does) at around the 7-10 day mark. Then in the hospital there's a huge variability in how long it takes for things to go downhill. Some patients who die have heart attacks within days of admission, others will be vented for up to months before dying.

The initial rise in cases in New York and elsewhere saw severely limited testing so the cases that were getting reported were already far along the path in the disease. New York City for a time had an awful policy where tests were only being conducted on those getting admitted to the hospital. Their positive test rate in late March was even worse than you saw with Arizona just recently which peaked at around 33%. Extremely high positive test rates mean there's larger proportions of undetected spread.

What you see now is testing catching a much larger proportion of people in the early days of their infections so the lag will appear a lot more of what it truly is.

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Essy