(03-25-2020, 01:59 PM)stupac2 Wrote: Remember that this picks up all fevers, it's not just covid fevers. The decline would happen more quickly because of fevers from pathogens with shorter incubation times, which is basically every common illness, right? It's not like SCC was running at this stable background level of covid fevers, it was flu, bad colds, etc etc. Those are what's coming down, covid is barely measurable.
They have some maps that show "anomalous" fevers that, provided whatever algorithm they use to predict the number of fevers can be trusted, would be much better at spotting covid in a population that's otherwise not changing its behaviors. But I'm not sure you can safely pick out a few dozen cases of covid out of what must be tens of thousands of background fevers.
Even so, this data suggests that people are reducing the spread of disease. One could reasonably expect that a reduction of temperatures, indicating a reduction for shorter incubation diseases would also indicate that the spread of COVID-19 is being impacted. This may be a good measure of effectiveness of social distancing efforts (closing schools, limiting gatherings, etc) in impacting disease spread. Certainly better than miles driven (gasoline use, etc.). Suburban electrical usage may be a way to measure time that homes are occupied.
The tweet's data is a bit out of date. For Santa Clara County, the Kinsa estimate of flu-like illnesses is now at 1.94%, just off the bottom of that chart. It appears to be starting to level out.