Coronavirus tracking and interpretation

Barring a surge in new cases today, I'm beginning to feel cautiously optimistic that social distancing is working to slow down the spread. Monday's 22,022 new cases represents a 15.3% increase over the previous total, which suggests that the declines we saw this weekend may be real, and not a "weekend blip" of lack of testing and reporting, though another day of reduced rates of increase would help solidify my faith that we are really seeing some improvement. I'm working on a project to be able to see on a state-by-state level what the rate of Covid-19 infections looks like over time, which is part of why this update today is so late, and also why I plan on providing fewer notes about the chart and tables for today. And so here's our favorite chart, showing the increase in states' rates of infection (measured in cases per 100,000) over the last 7 days. Hopefully over the next week we will see a slowdown here as well. And here is the rate of infec...

If you look at the statistics for Sunday, it seems like it was a very good day. The number of reported new cases (19, 306) was lower than the new cases for Saturday (19,818). This is the first day that the number of new cases declined over the previous day's in two weeks. As a percentage of the previous total number of cases Sunday's new cases represented an increase of 15.5%, a significant improvement over Saturday's 18.9% and continuing a trend of declining numbers for five days now. The question that we hope to be able to answer in the next two days is whether this is a weekend slowdown (in testing, reporting, collating data) or a real sign that social distancing is working. Let's take a look at the chart of coronavirus case rates. As always this chart shows the number of states falling within certain ranges of infection rates (cases per 100,000 people), over the last 7 days. And now let's look at the list of states: Notes: Washington's new infecti...

Yesterday I predicted we would pass two milestones on Saturday: 20,000 new cases and 2,000 cumulative fatalities. The latter milestone we blew past, with the total fatalities now at 2,198. The former milestone we did not pass, with "only" 19,818 new cases, but as that number is over 99% of the way there I don't think I will feel the model "failed" here. More importantly, yesterday's number of new cases represented an increase of only 18.9% over the previous day. Are we flattening the curve, or are we seeing a "weekend dip" as some testing centers close? I certainly hope the former, but we'll need a few days to see.... Here is my graph of the last 7 days in infection rates. As always, I am measuring the number of states that fall within certain ranges of infections rates, counted per 100,000, and each column represents a doubling of the rates of the column to its left. And here is the list of infection rates by state: Notes for Saturd...

The threshold for today is: 100,000. The United States has now passed that number of confirmed coronavirus cases. While a sobering figure, there is a ray of hope: Thursday's nearly 19,000 new cases represents an increase of 22%. That is a slight decline from Wednesday's rate of 24%, and Tuesday's rate of 25%. But what does that mean? Let's take a look at this chart, which shows the number of new cases each day (blue columns) and the new cases as a percentage of the previous day's totals (red line): Aside from a 2-day spike in percentage increase on March 19, the percentage increase has pretty much ranged between 20-40% for the entirety of March. That percentage rate has been declining for a week, but what I can't see yet is what that means for the future. I can envision three possiblities, from worst to best case scenarios: This is just natural fluctuation and the new infections will continue to increase 20-40% a day for the forseeable future. This 20% r...

Milestones: yesterday I made the prediction that we (the United States) would become the leader in (known) coronavirus infections, and that did come to pass. With just over 86,000 cases, we have passed current hotspot Italy (80,569) and even the country which first dealt with the new disease, China (just under 82,000). Given that China is adding new infections at around 100/day, Italy should pass them tomorrow. I hope you guys will allow me a bit of international divergence today, before we get to the deeper dives into what's going on in the US. A friend asked me how the United States fares in comparison to other countries, so I thought I'd take a look. First, let's look at just the raw numbers, done per capita, of a number of countries around the world. Bear in mind that some countries have less reliable statistics than others. This is a look at 14 countries that popped out at me. Some of these should be obvious: China & Italy, for example. Spain is also gettin...

Wednesday was not a good day. After a slowdown in the growth of reported cases on Tuesday we saw the numbers move up again, bringing us to almost 70,000. This means that today (Thursday) will see us pass up Italy in total number of cases, and very likely China, too. That would put us in first place. Mr. Trump, I'm tired of winning now. On a percentage level we've seen new cases at a rate 31.5% of all previous cases on Monday, then only up 20% on Tuesday (where the actual number dropped from Monday's total as well), then up to 25% of the previous day's total cases on Wednesday. The big good news from Tuesday (the drop in number of new infections), then, was probably a blip. And the big bad news (the first day of 200+ fatalities, only two days after the first day of 100+ fatalities), was not. Wednesday saw us get with 250 new fatalities, meaning we now have had over 1,000 deaths from coronavirus. That feels like a lot. In the grand scheme of things, it is not a lot......