COVID-19 April 30, 2020

As each day passes, the meaningfulness of infection numbers seems to diminish.  The number of tests continues to ramp up and this strongly affects the statistics.  The more tests you conduct on symptomatic people or people that have likely been exposed to the virus, the greater number of positives you'd expect.  Is this why the number of new cases confirmed each day leveled off?  It may be possible to answer this question at some time in the future when a clever epidemiologist is able to sift through the chaos that is the states' testing programs, but I don't think it's possible to do this in real time anymore.  That's a real problem because the number of new cases each day should be an important metric for determining the effectiveness or consequence of policy.

There are other metrics.  The number of daily deaths remains an important number.  I've said the dead are almost always counted.  The use of "almost" is appropriate.  Some dead are not counted.  Or, rather, some dead are counted but not attributed to COVID.  Sometimes they are counted long after they've died.  And, based on the unconfirmed news coming out of Florida, sometimes the dead are intentionally miscounted.  Perhaps this metric will soon become as unreliable as the number of new cases.  After that, we may have little left but to monitor hospital load.

Below are today's graphs.  The number of new daily cases is not decreasing as would be expected.  That has caused the cumulative number of cases to continue to rise at a greater rate than would be expected.  It is not quite an exponential rise, but rather a near linear increase with time. Total deaths and daily deaths are still well behaved with respect to the model.