March 21, 2020, 11:00 pm
#stayhomebewell for updates
Global Cases: 309,136. This is an increase of 31,632, or 11.4 percent. The growth is less than that of the previous two days. If this represents an inflection point having been crossed yesterday, I think that would suggest that perhaps Italy is coming out the other side of its ordeal. I have not been tracking the relative positions of all of the countries from day to day, but I do recall that China has always been in the top spot, with Iran and Italy in the second and third (I think), but what I do seem to remember was that, in order to find the numbers for the US, I was consistently having to scan the list down, down, to about the 10th place or so. Today we are in third place in total cases, but in first place in new cases, with 7,401 just today. Undoubtedly, this has everything to do with the new appearance of test swabs in the hospitals, as Governor Cuomo noted in his press briefing today.
Global Deaths: 13,141. This is an increase of 1,656, or 14.42 percent. This rate has been increasing since February 26th, when it bottomed at 1.34 percent.
Global Recoveries: 95,797. This figure increased today by 3,885, or 4.23 percent. The most recent trough in the rate of change of recoveries figure occurred on March 15, 2020, with only a 1.78 percent increase in the number of recoveries. On March 16, the number of new recoveries each day began to grow. I believe this represented the movement of China through its worst days of the maximum number of active, unresolved cases. Now, while China had only 46 new cases today, it had 700 new recoveries. China is nearing the end of its ordeal, with only 5,353 active cases remaining, and 75,701 closed cases, of which 96 percent (72,440) recovered, while 4 percent (3,261) resulted in death.
US Cases: 26,784. This is an increase of 7,209, or 36.83 percent. This rate of growth is less than that of the previous two days, but this may be due to reporting or the timing of my tallying up totals. The relevant thing to note is that a rate of growth 100 percent, a population is doubling every day. At a rate of 30-40 percent, a population is doubling in less than three days.
US Deaths: 344. Up by 82, or an increase of 31.30 percent.
US Recoveries: 176. Up by 29, or an increase of 20 percent.
If we take the current number of Cases in the United States as of today (26,784), and increase it daily by the rate of increase that was experienced globally (there were 28,266 cases globally on February 5, 2020), we can project a possible estimate of the timeline of cases and deaths in the country.
At the time of writing, the model predicts that we will see a level of 337,335 cases by May 6, 2020.
If we do the same calculation from the starting point of 334 deaths in the United States as of the time of writing (March 21, 2020), the model predicts that we will see a total of 10,147 deaths by May 6, 2020.
If we do the same type of projection using current numbers for cases in the Virginia increasing by the historical rates of growth in the United States as a whole, then we might get a more realistic projection of a timeline than by merely assigning a simple multiplier to our data, which will merely show increases.
According to the projection, 18 days from now, by April 8, we will reach 26,000 cases, which is the current level for the whole country. The time between China’s first case on December 31, 2019 to the first case in the US on January 21, 2020, was 21 days.
After that point, I’ve shifted the historical rate of change to the global historical rate. The global number of cases was 24,000 on February 4. That was 47 days ago.
I would note that in my post of a few days ago, when I hand-drew a projection of three possible timelines, 47 days was the exact time it took for China to go from its first case on December 31, 2019 to its inflection on February 12, 2020.
“Most people who die of COVID-19 will do so within 14-19 days. And on average, people who recover are released from the hospital after two-and-a-half weeks (17 days). But with the most critical cases, recovery could take months.”