#stayhomebewell for past and future updates
Global Cases: up 9 percent, or 71,140 new cases today, to 856,920. This is higher than yesterday’s change, and I’m tallying the numbers two hours earlier than I did last night. The 7-day rolling average growth rate today was 11.5 percent; and the average 7-day rolling average growth rate over the last 10 days has been 11 percent.
US Cases: up 14 percent, or 23,100 new cases today, to 187,350. Seventy days ago, the number was 1. ONE. The 7-day rolling average growth rate today was 23 percent; and the average 7-day rolling average growth rate over the last 10 days has been been 32.25 percent.
Global Deaths: up 11.35 percent, or 4,300 victims who died today, to 42,100. This growth rate is unchanged from yesterday’s, save for the time of data collection. Another two hours would indicate that today’s growth was greater than yesterday’s, and that is, of course, on a growing baseline number. This is exponential growth, albeit low exponential growth.
US Deaths: up 22 percent, or 695 US victims who died today, to 3,860. The first US death was 32 days ago. As I observed yesterday, this yields an average daily growth rate of 31 percent.
The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is calculated by dividing the number of Deaths by the number of Cases. The CFR globally is at 5 percent, up from 2 percent in January and February. The US CFR is at 2 percent and appears to be lagging the Global rate by roughly 53 days and trending upward.
Global Recoveries: up 7 percent, or 11,535, to 177,140. The Cases/Recoveries ratio is 4.84, which is up slightly from yesterday. The lower this number, the better. An increase in this ratio is an indicator of a worsening situation.
US Recoveries: up 17.34 percent, or 955 recovered patients today, to a total of 6,461 who have reported illness and survived COVID-19. Hopefully, the actual number is many times higher than this, assuming that some factor (10x, 50x, 100x) of Americans have actually contracted the corona virus, gone through the course of the disease, and recovered, without their statistic ever having been reported or noted. This would influence the Case Fatality Ratio by massively increasing the denominator, thereby bringing the CFR down substantially. However, we have to work with the data we have, and that data says the US CFR is 2 percent.
Global Unresolved: up 9.5 percent, or 55,315, to 637,670 current patients infected with COVID-19.
All cases can be divided into three categories: Unresolved, Death, and Recovered. The proportions of each of these three categories can tell us something about the progress of the pandemic. If there were no unresolved cases, then all of the others would have to be either Deaths or Recoveries. And if all cases ended in recovery, then eventually, Recoveries would make up 100 percent of all Cases.
The current breakdown of these three groups globally is 74 percent Unresolved, 5 percent Deaths, and 21 percent Recoveries. In the beginning of the pandemic, nearly all cases were Unresolved, there were a very few Deaths, and zero Recoveries. Gradually, the majority of infected patients recovered, and that portion grew from zero percent to a peak of 57 percent on March 7, before falling again to the current level of 21 percent. Over the same period, Deaths grew from zero to three percent, fell to 2 percent for a period of 21 days, and then rose to 3 percent also for 21 days; to 4 percent for 16 days, and has stood at 5 percent for the last 7 days. As I’ve posited before, the undulations in this curve likely represent the ebb and flow of the pandemic geographically. I suspect that the increase in the CFR, however, bodes ill. If anyone has another interpretation of this finding, please comment.
US Unresolved: up 13.8 percent, or 21,440, to 177,025 current patients infected with COVID-19. The ratio in the US is 94.5 percent Unresolved, 2.1 percent Deaths, and 3.4 percent Recovered. If the global data is a guide, it took 49 days (7 weeks) for that ratio to bottom out at 40 percent Unresolved, 4 percent Deaths, and 56 percent Recovered. My sense is that the US will see similar time frames for every wave of this pandemic: New York, New Jersey, California, Michigan, Florida, etc., and that they will overlap to some degree. If we suppose that there may be 10 such waves, and that they are spaced, say, two weeks apart, then I don’t actually know what the time frame would be, but let’s say it would be 10 waves of 5 weeks each, then we are looking at 50 weeks of this nightmare, just not all in the same place. I just pulled that calculation out of my ass, because, again, I’m either too thick or too tired to figure out what it would actually be. I’ll re-post the timeline I hand-drew a few days ago, which showed the actual China timeline followed by three possible US timelines. If any of you can figure out how long 10 waves with two-week overlaps would be, or if you have a different set of assumptions that might inform a timeline projection, please comment.
At the last couple of Task Force briefings, they have pretty much fessed up to the number 2.2 million. They can’t hide from it any more. They’re desperate to bring everyone back to the number 100,000, and continue to tell us that they’re hoping everything goes perfectly (oy, vey ist mir).
Not to pat myself on the back too strenuously, but those of you who have been following my posts were not surprised to hear that number today, I can assume. I still think they are low-balling it, though, because they want to squeeze every last minute of calm out of society that they can, before the shit really hits the fan. I’ve updated my chart showing what a 30 percent daily growth rate would mean in the number of Deaths we can expect (assuming that growth rate does not change, of course). I’ve input today’s number as Day 1, and you can see what happens over the subsequent 30 days.
I haven’t talked at all about what I think the repercussions of this pandemic will be, although I have done a good bit of thinking about it, and you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that nothing that has happened so far has surprised me. Let me know if you’re interested in having me pivot a bit away from just a recitation of the daily statistics, although I’m a little bit hesitant to get into that publicly.
I miss all of my friends. The silver lining to this shit show is that I’m in more frequent contact with a greater number of you than I have been. So that’s not nothing. Stay home and be well.