I have been following the Kinsa Health Maps healthweather.us to give me some insight into the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Here is their illness trend for Westchester County.
Go here https://healthweather.us/ to get the full explanation, but here is my brief interpretation.
Kinsa has internet-connected thermometers in homes, schools, clinics across the US. Kinsa collects this data in real time. "Fevers" are assumed to be associated with ILI (Influenza-Like Illness). It plots the incidence of illness along side their models of typical seasonal ILI trends for differenct geographical locations.
The trend for Westchester shows an anomaly starting about March 1. This is right about when the first case in New Rochelle was reported. On about March 15, when the social distancing started, the trend reversed.
The US trend is even more astounding. When social distancing started, the incidence of illness decreased. It has even dropped below the expected normal seasonal flu incidence. The unintended consequence is that we may be saving lives that would have died from the normal flu!
CAUTION!
In Dr. Raoult's study of 80 SARS-CoV-2 positive patients, only 15% had a fever!! (See previous blog) Does the Kinsa data undercount COVID-19 cases because of this? Perhaps Raoult's patients were in a later stage of the disease and their fevers had passed? OR, more sinister, does this virus sneak around the immune system and not trigger an immune response, evidenced by lack of fever? This would explain the large number of asymptomatic infectees and the number of patients still testing positive weeks after infection.
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