April 16, 2020, 7:45 pm
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There has been a change to the way the United States is counting Cases and Deaths. The CDC issues new guidelines that those collecting the data should include “presumed” cases and deaths in the totals. For this reason, we will see a noticeable jump in the numbers today, and likely over the next few days, as individual hospitals, cities, counties, and states go back through their historical records and identify patients and victims who were never confirmed with a laboratory test, but whom clinical observation identified as presumed COVID-19.
Global Cases: up 5.1 percent, or 105,860, to 2,180,000. Today’s increase was the greatest single day increase to date, and was 25,000 cases greater than yesterday’s increase of 75,000.
US Cases: up 5.5 percent, or 35,300, 677,050.
Global Deaths: up 8.46 percent, or 11,338, to 145,410. The average increase in the death toll over the last seven days has been 6,500, so today represents an increase of 74 percent over the norm for the last week.
US Deaths: up 21.6 percent, or 6,140, to 34,580.
Global Recoveries: up 7.3 percent, or 37,200, to 546,750.
US Recoveries: up 18 percent, or 8,760, to 57,270. I meant to post my prediction chart yesterday, but overlooked it. My prediction was pretty close to a bullseye. I had predicted 50,000. The actual number was 48,513.
Global Unresolved: up 4 percent, or 57,325, to 1,487,750.
US Unresolved: up 3.6 percent, or 20,400, to 585,200. This figure is the one that shows the throughput of cases into the pipeline. New Cases – (Recoveries + Deaths) = Unresolved. When there are fewer daily New Cases than daily Recoveries and Deaths, this number will begin to decrease. When that day comes, we will have some cause for optimism. But as long as the number in the Unresolved category is growing, we are still in the woods.
The next chart shows the extended rolling averages for each of the four measures described above (Cases, Deaths, Recoveries, and Unresolved). What is striking is the consistency of each curve’s conformity with the others. Whereas Recoveries naturally had a time lag, and (by definition) only Unresolved can dip into negative growth, the convergence of all four curves upon a small range of 3-6 percent daily rate of growth suggests that the ratios of Recoveries and Deaths to Cases has remained consistent over time. Roughly 25 percent of all victims have recovered, and 6 percent have died.
This consistency in the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) can be seen in the following chart, where the Deaths are the red bars, which have increased proportionally from 2 percent to 6 percent over the 86 days since January 22, 2020.
Please stay home and be well.