March 27 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

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% rate is a new normal. The idea here is that the statistic is not new infections, but new positive test results, a number that is driven both by new infections but also the number of tests performed. As we had a serious lack of testing early on, once testing began it is not surprising that the numbers of known infections would surge, probably faster than the actual increase in infections. So this decline could represent testing catching up with the actual infection rate.
• Social distancing is beginning to have an effect and slow the rate of Covid-19's growth.

I truly hope it is the third, and will be eagerly tracking this over the next few days. Regardless, I expect us to hit two new milestones today (Saturday): We will exceed 20,000 new cases in a day, and the total fatalities will hit 2,000, just three days after we hit 1,000.

Now, let's take a look at my chart showing the number of states with various rates of infection, and how that has changed over the last week. As always, rates of infection are cases per 100,000 people, and each column represents a doubling of the level of the column to the left.

Next, let's see the list of infection rates by state:

State infection rate notes:

• The question of whether Washington State is solving the problem of coronavirus spread is still left unanswered. For a while their rates of new infections had dwindled to 5%, then Wednesday it surged to 23%. For Thursday that new case rate dropped a good amount, to 16%. Does that mean Wednesday was a blip and we will continue to see a downward trend? We will have to wait and see.
• New York grew at 17.8% over the previous day. New Jersey grew by over 28%. The entire state of New York will soon be over the magic number of 300 cases per 100,000. New Jersey is approaching 100 per 100,000. New York is in crisis now, New Jersey will be in a few days.

Let's take a look at the county list I'm tracking:

County infection rate notes:

• New York city and three New York counties (all suburbs of NYC) are over the 300 per 100,000 number, and we are now hearing of crises in the health infrastructure of the area.
• Two of the ski resort counties, and New Orleans, have also passed the "magic number" rate.
• Dougherty County--I really worry for this region, centered around the small city (75,000) of Albany, GA. I have long wondered why this town is so hard hit with Covid-19. But the pandemic crisis there is, I think, revelatory of the crisis of local journalism in general. I discovered the surge in Dougherty County probably a week ago, and went to the website of the local newspaper to try to get some sort of explanation as to why things were bad there. Not only did I not get an answer, I didn't get a question. In other words, nothing I saw in the newspaper's coverage provided any real information that, in fact, their town was having a severe problem. And today, a week later, I still see nothing to indicate any awareness of the severity of the problem. There is a map of Georgia's counties and the number of cases there, and so you can see that Dougherty County has more than most, but the situation still seems less bad than Atlanta, when if you look at the issue on a per capita basis, as I have, Dougherty is much worse off than Atlanta. Finally there is a press release on the newspaper website from the Governor, which mentions the steps he is taking to help out the region, which he singles out as "a 'hotspot'", second to Atlanta (again, not on a per capita basis, and actually with more fatalities). That is the only sign I can find of local awareness of how bad things are there. And that is why I mention local journalism's crisis. I have heard of this issue for a while now: that local journalism is boring (to most) to read, little valued, and highly critical for a functioning democracy. Local newspapers send reporters to cover city council meetings, school board elections, county commissioner hearings. They are the ones who catch the corruption, nepotism, and incompetence that might occur. But with no one paying for it, local journalism is disappearing. If you go to the Albany Herald's website and look at their special Covid-19 webpage, you will get: an editorial from 2 weeks ago about the pandemic and how we're all in it together (with no hint that the town is particularly badly infected), a CNN article about Krispy Kreme giving out donuts to healthcare workers, a CNN Business article about the upcoming instacart shoppers strike, a different news source's story on the PGA, and finally a staff article about coronavirus that, as I mentioned before, does little more than collect the numbers of cases in various counties in Georgia and gives no hint that Albany is in crisis. A lack of local journalism resources means they can't even put out an article to let the citizens of Albany know they are in real trouble.

Top ten regions of concern

1. New York City. The New York - White Plains - Jersey City MSA as a whole now has a rate of almost 320 per 100,000... WITHOUT adjusting the three New Jersey counties upwards to account for the cases in New Jersey not yet assigned to a county. 
2. Ski Resorts.
3. New Orleans.
4. Dougherty County, GA.
5. Detroit. This is a close call, Seattle is still bad, but I think it fair to say that Detroit is probably a bigger crisis right now, with all other things being equal they are still growing much faster than Seattle.
6. Bartow County, GA.
7. Boston
8. Albany, NY
9. Denver.
10. Chicago.

Next on my list would be Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Washington, DC. San Francisco just passed the Silicon Valley area for hardest hit part of the Bay Area (and thus California as a whole), but would be 15th on my list.