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, \u201ca total ban on venturing out of your homes\u201d, as the Prime Minister said. India has a population of 1.3 billion people. So, with that one order, 1\/6 of the world\u2019s population is now under stay-at-home orders. That\u2019s without considering similar orders in other parts of the world. Just, wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But back to the US numbers. Some good news is that our trend line is down slightly. Although the chart hasn\u2019t updated today, as of last night the long term regression was at 29%. That\u2019s the number I\u2019ll be using for today\u2019s projections. I\u2019m still only going to project out to April 1st, but I\u2019ll start projecting a bit further later this week. Starting with 50,000, here\u2019s what the projection looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3\/24 50,000
3\/25 64,500
3\/26 83,205
3\/27 107, 334
3\/28 138,461
3\/29 178,615
3\/30 230,414
3\/31 297,234
4\/1 383,431<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The decrease to 29% has pushed the 100,000 threshold to Friday instead of Thursday. We\u2019ll take what we can get. Sill, remember that these are not hard and fast numbers, they can and will change. As we do more, or less, testing, we\u2019ll see the growth rate climb or drop a bit. Even a little drop in growth rate can make a substantial difference. That\u2019s why people try to get the lowest interest rate on a mortgage they can. The total price of a house financed at 4% is a lot less than if it were financed at 4.5%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another thing to remember is that the effects of social distancing take some time to show up. The cases we\u2019re seeing reported today are from infections last week or the week before. The onset of symptoms can take up to two weeks. It\u2019s possible that we\u2019re beginning to see some effect from the stay-at-home orders and that\u2019s why the rate has dropped some. Or, the change in rate could be from some other cause, or it could just be noise. It will take a while to figure that out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, all of this is based on reported cases. We really don\u2019t know how many actual cases there are. New York’s numbers are skyrocketing not just because they\u2019re doing a lot of testing, but because they\u2019re tests are coming back positive at a much higher rate. New York has a positive test rate above 25%. WA and CA have rates around 6%. This suggests that New York had a very high rate of unknown infections compared to WA and CA and that those infections are just now coming to light. It\u2019s possible that the virus first came to NY and was spreading there before the first case was detected in WA. That\u2019s another thing that we just don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A year from now, we\u2019ll have filled in a lot of the gaps in our knowledge, but for now we just have to do the best we can with what we\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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, \u201ca total ban on venturing out of your homes\u201d, as the Prime Minister said. India has a population of 1.3 billion people. So, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[10,8,6,7,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119,"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hardythoughts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}