The Numbers for March 25



Up until today, I’ve been putting up one post, which usually addressed more than one topic. I’ve decided I’m going to focus on just one topic in a primary post, and put up one or more “supplemental” posts, which will expand upon things I say in the primary post. I’ll put up the primary post last, so it will get picked up by the email feed. One supplemental post I will always do is “The Numbers”.

Yesterday’s numbers (as of about 6 PM EDT)
Total US confirmed cases (from Worldometer): 54,941
Increase in cases since previous day: 11,160
Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 25%
Percent increase in cases since 7 days previous: 757%
Expected cases 7 days from yesterday (March 29): 415,892 (up about 50,000 from yesterday)
Expected cases 14 days from yesterday (April 5): 3,148,224 (up about 70,000 from yesterday)

Total US deaths: 784
Increase in deaths since yesterday: 326
Percent increase in deaths since yesterday: 71%
Expected US deaths over course of pandemic: 1,648 (assumes no new cases starting today, and case mortality rate of 3%. Based on yesterday’s figures)
Expected US deaths 7 days from yesterday (March 29): 12,477 (same number as above, but calculated 7 days ahead. Note this means the number of total US pandemic deaths anticipated 7 days from now, using the same assumptions as above. Note it isn’t the number of deaths I expect to see reported 7 days from now – I can’t estimate that through purely mathematical means)
Expected US deaths 14 days from yesterday (April 5): 94,447 (ditto, but 14 days ahead. This is up 25,000 from yesterday)

I removed the “Total closed cases so far (deaths and recoveries)” and “Deaths as percentage of total cases so far” lines from the report, since Worldometers has stopped publishing the number for “Total Recovered”. As I mentioned yesterday, that was a fairly meaningless number, since the actual number of people recovered is certainly much larger than the number of people formally declared to have recovered. Publishing it seemed to imply that 66% of people who have contracted Covid-19 so far have died, whereas the vast majority are still neither officially recovered nor dead. The true mortality rate from the pandemic in the US will only be known when it’s officially over.

However, the number of deaths so far is unfortunately very easy to measure – just count the bodies. Note that this number increased 71% from the previous day to yesterday. I had earlier thought that a lot of deaths would only occur a number of months after the person contracted the disease, but clearly that’s not the case. Note that as of March 2, there were only 100 total confirmed cases. So the great majority of the people who have died as of today contracted Covid-19 in the last 2-3 weeks. This is quite disturbing, and it shows how very quickly the hospital system will become overburdened, since a lot of people will need to be hospitalized within 1-2 weeks of testing positive for the virus.







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