The Pandemic Blog

    For those of you who are following daily changes (and I’ve noticed more are doing that, from the comments I’ve received), you’ll see that the number of new deaths jumped by a couple hundred yesterday, after a big drop the day before. So the daily rate of increase went up to 3%, although the 3-day rate dropped from 10 to 9%. Since the latter is what I base my projections on, this means all of the projected deaths numbers fell again. Of course, that’s good news, but it needs to be tempered by the fact that all of the risks now are on the upside, since there’s a lot of movement to ease up on the lockdowns, even though almost none of the states meet the criteria for reopening that the White House announced about three weeks ago (e.g. only a few states with small populations could possibly be meeting the criterion of having an adequate supply of tests available now. And no state can meet the criterion for having a two-week drop in total cases, since there’s no state th...

The Worldometers numbers for yesterday contained both good and bad news. You may know that I track three reported numbers every day. The two I’ve discussed the most are total reported cases (which I now just report, nothing else – that number is such a small fraction of actual cases that it’s not worth paying much attention to anymore) and total deaths. Both of these numbers grew at their lowest daily rate since I’ve tracked them, and the 3-day growth rate of deaths (which is the only number I use to project total deaths into the future) was at its lowest value – 10% - since I started tracking deaths. See the paragraph in red below for further discussion of the deaths number. However, the third reported number that I’ve been tracking since March 24 (the first day the data were available to track it) is the total number of recoveries – i.e. people who were sick with Covid-19, but are now recovered. This is a number we of course want to go up, not down. But yesterday, total reco...