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.
Comments
Post a Comment