COVID-19 May 01, 2020

And so another month begins.  Where will the month end?  Unlike April, where the trajectory was mostly predictable, May is likely to be much more uncertain.  New daily cases are not falling.  They have more or less leveled off with a very, very large weekly oscillation superimposed.  On the other hand, the death rate is falling, slowly, on average but also with a large weekly oscillation. 

For now, the infections and deaths are inconsistent unless the mortality rate is changing substantially over time. If the mortality rate is invariant, then deaths should track infections with a lag.  Will deaths start to level off over the next week?  If not, that suggests that the behavior of the infection data is due to changes in testing and reporting.  It means that that data becomes almost useless without substantial analysis to remove the spurious signal.  It means that, for now, the death rate will be one of the few easily accessible and analyzable data for tracking this pandemic.