COVID-19 May 03, 2020

This will be a fairly short Sunday post. The usual figures are below. My friend pointed out that it might be possible to remove some of the signal from varying testing rates by normalizing the cases by the number of tests. Not sure I'm going to go down that rabbit hole for a variety of reasons, the primary reason being that this is just a temporary hobby and I do still have a day job. However, a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that to compare current numbers to those of mid-ish April, I should multiply today's numbers by about 63%. With 30,000 new cases, 63% would be about 18,750. And, if you look at the daily case graph, that's only a few thousand off from where the Gompertz curve predicts it should be. So, the number of tests can be important.  Deaths continue to follow the model.  I still consider deaths to be the most robust metric. I may need to make a minor adjustment mid-week as the model seems to overdoing the numbers ever so slightly.