March 30 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

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 infection chart, for all the states:


Notes:

• New York can take a lot of comfort in the fact that their infection growth rate is slowing, with Monday's numbers representing an increase of only 11% over previous totals. And they will need that comfort, because the number of people dying will be difficult to deal with for some time to come. Remember, with coronavirus when we look at the stats around us we are really looking some time into the past.
• New Jersey, on the other hand, is growing more than twice as fast, with new infections Monday totaling some 24% of the previous total.
• Connecticut fared even worse, with an increase of new infections representing 29% the previous total, and that pushed Connecticut from 7th place in the list of states with highest rates of infection to 5th place.

And here's the county list:

My list of the ten worst-affected communities is expanded to 15, because so many of the worst-affected communities are in the NYC Combined Statistical Area.:

1. New York-Jersey City-White Plains.
2. Long Island.
3. Ski Resorts.
4. New Orleans.
5. Albany, GA.
6. Newark, NJ.
7. Bridgeport, CT.
8. Poughkeepsie, NY.
9. Seattle.
10. Boston.
11. Detroit.
12. Shreveport, LA.
13. Indianapolis.
14. Chicago.
15. Albany, NY.

I'm going to rename my "Rant of the Day" to "Thought of the Day". My thought for today is about fatality rates. I've been focused on this "magical number" of 300 cases per 100,000 as the point at which hospitals get overwhelmed and seriously ill patients can no longer get the care that could keep them alive. I would like to take a deeper look at this, but scratching the surface shows some hints that this is indeed the case. When I began tracking numbers on March 18, the New York CFR (case fatality rate) was 1%, while the US as a whole had 1.4%. Those numbers held steady for about 10 days, but over the last few days have crept upwards. On Monday, New York's CFR was 2%, while the overall US rate has gone up to 1.9%. New York City's rate is now 2.4% (I did not track it earlier). In New Orleans and Dougherty County, GA the CFRs are in the 5-6% range, though again I have not been tracking them so can't report what they were earlier. This is something I would like to look into more, perhaps after I get my state day-by-day charts available.

I did at one point try to get a more exact estimate of the point at which medical systems would be overwhelmed. I found a site affiliated with Dartmouth University which provided a list of "acute care" beds throughout the country. Not all the metro areas on their list lined up perfectly with my county lists, but it seemed like it would be useful. Unfortunately, using a 5% number (which seems to be a pretty good number for how many sickened will need an ICU bed) to compare the Covid-19 numbers of ICU beds needed vs the available "acute care" beds didn't really work; the Covid-19 numbers were much lower, even in the hardest-hit areas, than the number of acute care beds in those areas, and I realized the missing factor is how much spare capacity those areas have. In other words, New Orleans might have 300 acute care beds, but how many of those are in use at any given time for other needs? Without knowing that, this chart I was making was pretty much useless.

On top of that, we are still doing nowhere near the amount of testing needed. Even today, in NYC I am hearing that the only tests performed are for medical personnel, first responders, and patients hospitalized with suspected coronavirus cases. If this is the norm around the country, then it is quite likely our ICU beds needed will be much higher than 5% of known infections, as many of the least affected never get tested.

But for now it keeps reinforcing the idea that there is a threshold.