April 21, 2020

April 21, 2020, 11:00 pm

#stayhomebewell for past, current, and future analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic. www.stayhomebewell.org. and www.facebook.com/stayhomebewell. Instagram and Twitter, too. Please react and share on any platform you use. It still matters what people do.

Global Cases: up 3.03 percent, or 75,315, to 2,557,180. The growth rate has been between three and four percent for eight of the last nine days, with today’s rate the lowest of them. The extended rolling average is 4.4 percent. I don’t think that the trough has developed yet, but I expect to see it in the coming 7-14 days. The one thing that has been the most consistent throughout this pandemic, however (my overshooting the mark on my last upward projections notwithstanding), is that almost everything has happened faster than anyone expected.

US Cases: up 3.31, 26,250, to 819,165. It was just over two months ago that we had 15, and were told that the number would soon go down to zero. We were also told that in April, with the warmer temperatures, the virus would miraculously disappear.

Global Deaths: up 4.22 percent, or 7,186, to 177,641. The Case Fatality Rate is at 6.95 percent, the highest it has been to date.

US Deaths: up 6.64 percent, or 2,823 dead today, to 45,340. Around three weeks ago, I projected we would see the 45,000 mark by April 15. A couple of weeks previous to that, I had projected 23,000 deaths, and my upward revision was a bit too aggressive, because it was my fourth upward revision, and I guess my ego didn’t want me to make the same mistake a fifth time. In the graph above, a crude trend line projection points to a level of 6,000 deaths per day by approximately May 24. In my post of April 20, I projected that the total deaths in the US would reach 100,000 by May 20. As always, I hope for nothing so much as to be wrong about this.

Global Recoveries: up 6 percent, or 38,900, to 690,444. The previous four days’ rates of growth were between 4 and 5 percent, with the low point of 4.26 percent having occurred yesterday. This may have been the trough in the Recoveries curve. The next few days should tell.

US Recoveries: up 14.62 percent, or 10,585, to 82,975. It is unclear why there are such wide fluctuations in the number of Recoveries from one day to another. However, this erratic pattern is visible in both the Global and the US figures. The extended rolling average growth rate is 11 percent, and may have reached its low point yesterday at 10.9 percent. It appears that the trough is fully formed, and that after a few days, we will see an increase in the growth rate of US recoveries, likely representing the tail end of the New York epicenter. When the next wave is fully upon us, in 14 to 21 days, this growth will reach a new apex, will plateau, and will repeat this pattern, until the third wave develops.

This begs the question: how many waves will there be?

Global Unresolved: up 1.76 percent, or 29,225, to 1,689,100. This is the lowest growth rate in this figure for 48 days, since coming up out of negative territory on March 4. The extended rolling average rate of growth is 2.8 percent. This may be the trough. I don’t remember off hand, but I think that in one of my recent posts, I predicted that we would see a trough develop without the growth rate ever descending into negative numbers. This means that the net number of people sick with COVID-19 will not decrease; it will merely increase less quickly for a while, before growing faster and faster while the next wave hits.

US Unresolved: up 1.9 percent, or 12,845, to 690,850. This growth rate is the lowest to date. The extended rolling average growth rate is also its lowest to date, at 4.9 percent. It appears a trough is forming. This measure is perhaps the most important, in that it illustrates the throughput, if you will, of humans through the COVID-19 meat grinder. People get sick, and people recover or die. How many get sick on a given day versus how many recover or die on that same die determines how many are in the Unresolved category on any given day. In this chart, we can see that, on every day of this pandemic in the United States, the number of people suffering (or tested positive, but not necessarily suffering, if they are one of the fortunate asymptomatic infected) has ALWAYS been greater than the number of people recovering or dying. This is evidenced by the fact that the *growth* rate has never entered negative territory, as we saw for two weeks in the global data. A growth rate of only five percent is still terrible news. Growth rates of 15, 20, and 30 percent should terrify.

There is too much to comment on, if we’re talking about the news, new discoveries regarding testing, supply chains, the economy, the political Punch-and-Judy that we are living every day, the stories from the front lines from doctors and nurses. There’s just too much.

I have first- and second-hand accounts from hospitals that friends have forwarded to me that are harrowing.

The explosion of cases in the meat processing industry throughout the United States.

News articles of food rotting in the fields or being destroyed by farmers.

The summer season is on our doorstep and seasonal migrant workers will likely be prohibited from entering the country to harvest the crops.

The prisons.

The bible belt.

Unemployment measured now in the tens of millions, not in thousands.

Strikes being called or threatened in vital supply chain segments.

Rents and mortgages unpaid.

Oil is no longer an asset and is now a liability???

Uneducated citizens with legitimate grievances, but without the understanding to know where those grievances ought rightly to be pointed.

Those same citizens attacking and blaming the very experts who are struggling to save their poor, ignorant lives, and supporting the con artists and thieves who are abandoning them to their doom.

The abject failures of the Administration in both its strategy for handling this crisis and in that strategy’s lame implementation.

The global economy appears to be a machine that runs on momentum, and that momentum is debt. Just like a bicycle, if it loses its momentum and stands still, it crashes to the ground. The solution would appear to be if a grand referee could just blow a whistle and say that the game is simply suspended for a period of time, if everything could just be frozen in place until the virus ceases to have hosts to inhabit, then we could just blow a whistle and unfreeze everything and resume our lives. But, in order for that to happen, every actor in the entire mechanism would have to suspend their own parochial interests in favor of the common good. But we know they will never do that. Instead they will say, in the immortal words of Henry Hill, “Fuck you, pay me.”

It is one in the morning where I am, and, thank god, I still have a job to get up for in the morning. So I just don’t have the energy to do a news roundup. Suffice it to say, there is another wave coming very soon. And there will be a third wave after that. The states that “re-open” are going to have a very, very rude awakening in two to four weeks that will be measured in tens of thousands sick, and in two to four weeks after that, in thousands upon thousands dead.

I don’t think you need me to digest the news for you. My job is to digest the data for you. If you read this and can learn to understand the charts I’m providing each day, then you can see how they evolve and you will be able to synthesize the news for yourself. If you are new to this blog, and you really want to understand, I strongly suggest going back in the archives to my first post and reading from there. All of the charts will make more sense if you go back and read my more detailed explanations of them from when I first introduced them, and as they have evolved. If you do that, then the meaning of tomorrow’s charts should be evident at a glance.

Several weeks ago, I took half of my money out of the bank and am holding it in cash. Half electronic, half cash.

Stay home and be well.