Wednesday, March 25, 2020

US Still 15 Days Behind Italy

The US case number is still 15 day behind Italy.

15 days ago, the US was...15 days behind Italy.


11 comments:

David in Cal said...

74,000 tests yesterday. That excludes tests done by smaller independent labs. These independent labs will be reporting to CDC in a very few days. That should produce a jump in the number.

cheers

Ned said...

Yeah, that was a pretty discouraging number. At least it wasn't a drop like yesterday.

We need to be testing in the six figures per day and it's taking a long time to get there.

Ned said...

Here are the trend numbers I've been running each day. Again, these are rates of increase over the past 7 days, for log-transformed counts:

* New cases: 0.18
* New deaths: 0.27
* New tests: 0.17

New cases have not been increasing as rapidly over the past few days. The optimist in me hopes that it's a very early sign of social distancing starting to bend the curve a little.

On the other hand, new testing is still rising even more slowly than new cases. So we're still losing ground when it comes to testing.

Here is the other metric I follow -- mean percent positive for tests in the past 3 days:
* Pct positive: 15.5%

It's down a hair from yesterday, which is good, but it's still way too high - indicates that there are many undetected cases out there.

Ned said...

Next, for the "predictions" I made last weekend about the # of new deaths per day this week. I'm not sure that today's numbers are final yet:

Sun 3/22: 85 [actual = 113]
Mon 3/23: 110 [actual = 141]
Tue 3/24: 142 [actual = 225]
Wed 3/25: 183 [preliminary = 163]
Thu 3/26: 236
Fri 3/27: 305
Sat 3/28: 394

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday's predictions were too low, especially Tuesday's - deaths were 50% higher than my prediction. Today's prediction appears to be slightly too high, though the results are still coming in as I write this.

Numbers of cases are highly uncertain due to inadequate testing, but numbers of deaths are more solid. It's disturbing that these have been rising so fast; faster than the exponential model I based these predictions on.

David in Cal said...

London: The British government is just "days" away from releasing 3.5 million self-administered finger prick tests that could prove a game-changer in easing the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

The public will eventually be able to take the test at home to determine whether they have had coronavirus and developed antibodies, meaning they can avoid lockdowns and go back to work because they are immune and cannot infect others.


https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/game-changer-britain-days-away-from-releasing-millions-of-coronavirus-finger-prick-tests-20200326-p54dyy.html

If they could manufacture enough of these, it could be great.

Cheers


Ned said...

Oops, a large number of additional deaths came in after I posted that. Wednesday's number is now well above the prediction from the exponential model, in line with the previous three days:

Sun 3/22: 85 [actual = 113]
Mon 3/23: 110 [actual = 141]
Tue 3/24: 142 [actual = 225]
Wed 3/25: 183 [actual = 247]
Thu 3/26: 236
Fri 3/27: 305
Sat 3/28: 394

Ned said...

A bunch of articles this morning noting that the USA just passed the grim milestone of 1000 total CV deaths. What they don't mention is that before the end of this weekend we will have had another 1000, and then starting on Monday (+- a day or so) there will be over 1000 deaths every day.

If the death rate doesn't slow down soon, a week from today we're on track to have a "9/11 day" (3000 deaths in a single day). I do not think Americans are mentally prepared for this.

Entropic man said...

Congratulations. The US now has more cases than Italy and you'll probably overtake China tomorrow to become, in President Trump's words, the greatest country in the world.

Entropic man said...

Forgot the link.😗

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Layzej said...

As a percentage of population they are not even on the first few pages, although from that view, the UK, Canada and USA have all lapped China some time ago.

Ned said...

No doubt most readers here (except those who get their news from Breitbart etc.) have seen this:

The outgoing Obama Administration's National Security Council provided a detailed 60+ page set of guidelines to the Trump Administration about how to handle a sudden global pandemic, and tried to coach them through a workshop on it.

The Trump team ignored it, and perhaps due to the fact that Trump is now on his 6th National Security Advisor, doesn't seem to even know that the guidance exists.

A PDF of the document has been uploaded here.

The first few pages are fairly bland report-ese, but then it gets into dozens of pages of key questions, each linked to information about which agencies are responsible for them, and then appendices listing resources available within every federal agency that need to be activated in response to a pandemic.

What a tragic waste that so much effort went into preparing the federal government for an event like this, and then all that knowledge was just shelved and ignored.