I grow weary of pointing out the constant stream of unresearched devoid of logic arguments made by the live in a cave crowd but here we are. Let's tackle something that is an article of faith handed down from on high but is actually false. It is taken as God given scientific 1/n
Fact by the "live in a cave crowd hundreds of thousands will die you monster and the peak is always just out of reach" set that what we are seeing now in cases was actually from 14 days ago. Now even if that is true, given that NYC (to take a specific case) has been on 2/n
Lockdown since March 19, dynamics should have been changing materially for the social distancing jet set for sometime given that this is 26 DAYS past that. Actually, the 14 days is wrong even though it is treated as fact. 14 days is the recommended quarantine period 3/n
Because there have been cases that develop that long after initial infection and due to viral dynamics BUT and this is important 14 days is NOT the time it takes corona to present with symptoms. 14 days is only the recommended time to be on the safe side. Medical research 4/n
Very consistently finds a period from infection to presentation of symptoms between 4-5 days. Some studies show a little bit less but I think it is fair to say mainstream accepted work counts it as 4-5 days. This has a lot of implications so follow me here 5/n
First, the distribution (think bell curve) of cases has a long skinny tail to the right. By that I mean (take a simple and semi-extreme example) if the average is 5 days you would have 4 cases with symptom onset at 2, 3, 4, and 11 days for an average of 5 days. This means 6/n
In reality, MOST cases will present themselves shortly after infection and NOT the mythical 14 days everyone talks about. Second, for NYC (to take a narrow simple example for which I have easily viewable data at my fingertips) this radically shifts the timeline. 7/n
Taking March 19 as the lockdown date, symptom presentation should have been peaking in the subsequent days, but in reality they were for the most part lower and definitely not peaking. So what exactly is going with corona then? 8/n 
Third, is it possible that the incubation and symptom presentation timeline is significantly different? Possible but rather unlikely. Is it possible that right hand skew on the distribution is impacting this? Possible but unlikely. There are more likely but less appetizing 9/n
probabilities. For instance, one has to consider that NYC sucks at social distancing though from what I've heard and the pictures I've seen this doesn't seem to fit. If we need to lock down NYC even more, I personally volunteer to come weld a couple people inside 10/n
Another possibility is that social distancing has minimal impact on corona spread. If social distancing and all its variations have minimal spread this actually means (wait for it) corona is significantly more of a spreader than most people think. This actually fits the data 11/n
And evidence pretty well. Couple studies showed that in Asia, even cities with social distancing measures they were only able to push R0 down to about 1.8. There is lots of evidence corona spreads significantly from environmental factors. For instance, particulate or air 12/n
pollution spread as well as air conditioning or fecal plume spread. Whatever, the exact answer is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, social distancing is NOT having the impact people think it is. We need to consider alternative explanations. 13/n
Finally, likely a lot of this has nothing to do with the actual spread and more to do with our testing for corona. It should come as no surprise, though I think many have forgotten, that cases started going up right as we started testing more. Have fun social distancing kids!
