- by New Deal democrat
Here is the update through yesterday (March 28)
[NOTE: I am not including the State by State breakdown today, which is time-intensive to create. It will resume tomorrow.]
In order to succeed in containing the pandemic, I believe that the US needs 2 weeks of China (nearly complete lockdown) followed by at least a month of South Korea (very aggressive and widespread testing).
At minimum, that means at least 50% of the US population under lockdown and a ratio of 15:1 in tests to results showing infection. The recent exponential growth of about 35% per day must be stopped. Those three most important metrics are starred (***) below.
As of now, about 60% of the population is under total or business lockdown, and the rate of increase in new infections decelerated significantly - but is still growing at over 20%/day averaged over the last 5 days. The amount of testing continues to increase, but still is falling far short of what is necessary for a successful regimen.
Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com)
- Number: up +19,849 to 124,686 (vs. +18,825 on March 27)
- ***Rate of increase: day/day: 19% (vs. 34.6% baseline and vs. 22% on March 27)
I have been using Jim Bianco’s excellent exponential projection of 34.5% growth from March 10 as my baseline. It appears that “social distancing” strategies as well as State-mandated partial and total lockdowns may have begun to put a dent in the exponential rate of increase, as the average rate of increase for the past 5 days has been 22%.
Note: Ben Engebreth, whose Department of Numbers used to track house prices back in the housing bubble days, has started tracking coronvirus infection and testing numbers, with graphs. You can find it here.
Number and rate of increase of testing (from COVID Tracking Project)
- Number: 109,071, up +1,742 vs. 107,329 on March 27 day/day
- Rate: increase of 2% vs. number of tests previous day
Comparison of rates of increase in documented infections vs. testing
- Infections +19% vs. Tests +2% day/day
Result: The rate of testing is failing to improve and is far, far below what is needed, which is probably now at least 200,000/day. Note this number is also increasing exponentially as we try to chase the number of exponentially increasing infections.
Ratio of tests to positives for infection (from COVID Tracking Project)
- Number: 109,071 new tests vs. 18,821 new diagnosed infections
- ***Ratio: 5.8:1
In South Korea, where aggressive testing has led to a near-total disappearance of new cases, the inflection point where the number of new daily cases plateaued was reached when the ratio of tests to new cases found reached 15:1. Any ratio less than that suggests that not enough testing is being done. Yesterday’s ratio of 5.8:1 is poor - and has been worsening for the past week, I.e., we are falling further and further behind in testing.
