There was an upward blip in new cases in yesterday's numbers. We'll have to keep a watch on that. It could be just a statistical aberration associated with poor testing. It was clear that several states had a bunch of new test results dumped on them yesterday. Georgia went from 126 to 1028 cases. Louisianna jumped from 485 to 1212. At the same time, the State of Washington has failed to report anything for the last two days. Their data server has crashed due to the large volume. Since they are a hot spot, those numbers could be relatively important.
The number of deaths continues to grow exponentially with little change. Note that the 10 day best fit matches the long-term almost exactly. The daily death rate is close 1,000 and will hit that mark in a day or two.
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From Genomeweb:
https://www.genomeweb.com/scan/next-testing-hurdle
The Next Testing Hurdle
Apr 01, 2020
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The next SARS-CoV-2 testing crisis may be on the horizon, the Atlantic reports.
Testing for SARS-CoV-2 in the US got to a slow start as testing kits developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exhibited issues when undergoing quality control checks. This led to delays as the CDC had to re-manufacture a reagent for the kit. To bolster testing capability, a number of private companies and labs stepped in to develop and offer tests.
But as the Atlantic now reports, some labs may have taken in more samples than they could run. In particular, it notes that while California is now testing about 2,136 patient samples for SARS-CoV-2 a day, more than 57,400 Californians have pending test results. The Atlantic traces some of these pending results to Quest Diagnostics' difficulties in scaling up testing while still accepting samples for testing. The lab first started out using a labor-intensive laboratory-developed test before switching to a high-throughput test developed by Roche, it adds. But, according to the Atlantic, samples collected for the first LDT can't be run on the Roche one, accounting in part for the backlog.
It adds, though, that the problem isn't limited to Quest or to California, but argues that "California is the flare alerting the nation to systemic problems in our testing regime. Will we heed it?"
This is my concern. Not only is it that there are insufficient tests, but that of the tests that are done, the processing of those tests is insufficient. It's not just a test supply problem, it's a test throughput problem. Together, it really calls into question the data reported by the states. If we had good numbers on testing ability and throughput for every lab in every state, it would be theoretically possible to correct the models to account for those issues. Perhaps the state epidemiologists have that info and are internally generating data for policymakers. I doubt it, but who knows.
100% agreed.
Unfortunately the country waited until the train left the station, so to speak. Now we're behind the 8-Ball.
In Orange County, FL they are finally testing everyone. We were only testing 65+ crowd but as we all know, in order to get ahead of this, we have to test anyone to isolate, trace, and treat.
Just observing other states and countries I think FL is going to be NY in a couple weeks.
So, this flattening we see, I feel we can conclude it's not the truth, and we're in for a pretty wild ride until August and maybe beyond.
I'll add an additional complication. The US is not a monolithic, uniformly distributed population. The US a network of dense cities interconnected with smaller cities and towns adjacent to more dispersed populations diffusing into the hinterlands. So, as you say, Florida is the next New York, and each city responds as a single entity embedded in the network. Each city is in a different phase of the natural infection process from growth to stabilization to decay. New York went first. Florida, or more precisely, the cities within Florida followed by the state as a whole may very well be next. But in the end the aggregate US response is the summation of different infection pulses occurring at different times with different growth rates, peaks, and decay depending on the policies that are in place and their level of interconnectedness with other nodes. This can result in a very complicated aggregate curve as a function of time. It could have multiple peaks and decays as each city goes through the cycle at different times. The flattening we're seeing now is mostly because NY has flattened, and the next city isn't yet far enough into the cycle to steepen the curve once again. But those new hotspots are coming, and if they are large enough, the curve could steepen once again, before flattening in advance of the next surge.
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