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COVID-19

Wobbly Numbers

The projection from two days ago had us above 83,000 for today. As I look at the tracker, we’re only at 76,543. That’s good news, and I always get a smile when a number has some interesting pattern in it. It’s too early to tell whether the curve is flattening or if this is just […]

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COVID-19

10,000 deaths

We crossed the threshold of 1000 COVID deaths this evening. As I start to write this post, the tracker shows 1045. I’ve focused mostly on the growth rate of cases thus far, so let me switch to deaths. Deaths are the saddest part of all this, though it’s the hospitalizations that stand to overwhelm our […]

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COVID-19

50,000

Welcome to 50,000 reported cases, of which roughly half are in New York. In other news this morning, India announced a total lock down of the entire country for 3 weeks, “a total ban on venturing out of your homes”, as the Prime Minister said. India has a population of 1.3 billion people. So, with […]

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COVID-19

It’s Going to Get Bad

Headlines this morning carry a message from the surgeon general, “This week, it’s going to get bad.” He went on to say, “Everyone needs to act as if they have the virus right now. So, test or no test, we need you to understand you could be spreading it to someone else. Or you could […]

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COVID-19

40,000

We now have more than 40,000 reported cases. We’re running 3 days ahead of the projection I made back on the 14th. At our current growth rate, we’ll be adding more than 10,000 cases per day now. Expect to see the numbers grow alarmingly this week. We’re still on track to be over 100k by […]

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COVID-19

Logging the Virus

There are a lot of coronavirus graphs these days. I’ve been seeing more log graphs around and some confusion about how to read them. I think we’ll see log graphs more often as we go forward, so it’s a good idea to understand what they mean. If you’re already comfortable with log graphs, there’s probably nothing […]

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COVID-19

31,000

First off, I think I may have overreacted to short term changes in the growth rate in my last projection. The projections are mathematically right, but in retrospect the increased rate of growth we saw may have been noise rather than signal. I’ll be taking a more conservative approach today, based on the trend graph […]

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COVID-19

Some Hope in Washington

My posts lately may have sounded a bit dire. I want to offer some hope in this one. Let’s look at the three states with the most cases, WA, CA, and NY. The first picture shows the graphs of cases starting in mid February. The orange line is the one I want to focus on. […]

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COVID-19

16,000

Yesterday morning, we passed 10,000 cases. This morning we’re at over 16,000. That’s a 60% increase. Yesterday’s midnight to midnight growth rate was 53%, that’s what I’ll mostly use in this post. The day before saw an increase of 47% The day before that was 38%. Obviously, the growth rate has been accelerating. The good […]

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COVID-19

10,000

So we’ve reached 10,000 cases in the US about a day earlier than our projection estimated.  What does that mean? There are several things it could mean.  I’m going to go through a list of possibilities in roughly the order of increasing probability. 1) The virus has gotten stronger.This is possible, but highly unlikely.  To […]