Innocent Bystanders

Not Going to Say It This Time… March 30, 2020

Nope, I’m not going to express any optimism whatsoever. You hear me Fates? No optimism here; just bleak, unrelenting depression.

Even though Worldometer put this chart out (cases per day in the US):

…and this one… (deaths per day in the US)

But I’ve been toyed with too many times – tempt me not, Fates!

You’ll hear no upbeat take from me!

Start Spreading the Flus March 29, 2020

Well, not the flu, exactly. Plotted up COVID-19 deaths by state for states with 15 or more deaths. From this you can see how New York is dominating the statistics:

New York represents 40% of the nation’s deaths to date. New York City proper is responsible for 3/4 of New York’s deaths. So what does the trend look like for NYC? Here’s what NYC Health says (I stole this chart from their Daily Data Summary):

So basically no end in sight.

March 26 Coronavirus Update March 27, 2020

COVID-19’s reign of terror continues, with just over 25K deaths reported worldwide as of this moment. Here are the cumulative casualties in the countries we’ve been tracking:

Though Italy continues to have the worst experience of any country on the planet, it does appear that their death rate has stabilized at ~700/day for the past week.

The United States’ death rate continues to increase, albeit slowly (chart was taken from Worldometer and modified):

At 300 deaths/day, it would take six and half months to reach the death toll of the 2017-2018 flu season. Even at Italy’s death rate, it would take three months.

The Answer is “No” March 23, 2020

The answer to the title of my last post that is. At least for the United States. After a couple of days of declining deaths due to coronavirus, Sunday saw us get hammered with 117 casualties. Here’s the chart of United States deaths that crushed my optimism (copied directly from Worldometer):

New York has been the hardest hit, with nearly 36% of deaths through yesterday.

Here’s how the various countries are doing. First, the closeup of the United States:

And here are all the data:

The data for Italy and Spain are not encouraging. More terrifying than encouraging.

Is the Coronavirus Casualty Rate Starting to Slow in Select Countries? March 21, 2020

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, coronavirus-wise. Despite the infection rate rising as testing becomes more prevalent, deaths were down in the United States and France, and the death rate leveled off in Iran. Here are the data for the three countries:

The UK also had a good day, but it is still early in the game when there are still meaningless fluctuations in the data (actually due to the short timelines, that’s kind of true of almost all countries).

Sadly, both Spain and Italy had their worse days: 627 casualties in Italy and 262 in Spain.

With 15 hours elapsed in the current day, the US has only reported 20 deaths. That suggests that we’ll have another (relatively) good day.

Coronavirus Update – March 19 March 19, 2020

So there’s no good news over the past couple of days, with all majorly infected countries save China & S. Korea showing exponential increases in deaths. The chart below is updated through March 19, and I’ve added the UK.

The UK had a slow start, but erupted over the past 5 days. Germany also had a slow start, but is rapidly accelerating.

The US, sadly, has not been spared, and is closely tracking France’s casualties.

You can see the big picture below:

Italy’s and Spain’s trajectories are absolutely terrifying. The UK may be on the same path.

Coronavirus Update – March 17 March 18, 2020

Dismal St. Patrick’s Day, what with all the bars and restaurants in Colorado closed. I was asking myself, “Couldn’t they have waited one more day to close everything so we could at least give the bars the St. Patrick’s Day revenue boost?”

Then I updated the coronavirus chart and decided that maybe they couldn’t:

Yeah, that’s the United States that’s now riding the exponential curve. Let’s hope that the closures, curfews, and changes in behavior let us avoid the tragic experience of Italy:

China, on the other hand, has reduced its death rate to fewer than 20 per day. But it’s the only country to bend the curve, and their data is always suspect, so I’m going to wait for another country to pull it off before I believe that it’s possible to curb the death rate that quickly.

Coronavirus Update – March 14 March 15, 2020

I updated the chart from a couple of days ago, adding S. Korea and making it current through March 14.

As you can see, South Korea has managed to keep its deaths linear, without the exponential explosions in deaths suffered by Spain, Italy, Iran, and China. France look like it may be following the same track as its European neighbors, though its a tad early to tell.

And the US? Our curve is bending upward, but slowly. Still, given the size of the country’s population, I don’t think you can say that the US’s health and disease control systems are doing any worse than any other country. If the data holds up after another week, I think you’ll be able to say that we’re doing better.

The chart above is truncated so that you can see the US’s data clearly. This is what the complete chart looks like (except China – I only plotted the first 50 days of data for China):

Shows you just how hard Italy has been hit.

Comparing Coronavirus Deaths Among Countries March 13, 2020

The Trump administration has been criticized for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, which made me curious: Exactly how does the US experience with the virus stack up with other countries?

Fortunately there is a handy resource provided by Worldometer which gives us the data to make such a comparison.

Since diagnosis/confirmation of the disease is iffy, I decided to plot deaths rather than reported cases. And to give everyone an equal start, I plot the cumulative deaths from the date of the first death in that country.* This allows us to see how fast the number of deaths grew after the virus claimed its first victim.

So here is the data from the eight countries with the most coronavirus cases:

As you can see,the experience in Spain, Italy, and Iran has been terrible. France and the United States are very close (despite the United States’ almost 5X larger population). Germany is just getting started, and China’s data is, as always, suspect.

But it’s obviously still early in the pandemic’s hopefully brief assault, so comparisons are premature. Nevertheless, there’s no obvious reason to think that the Trump administration’s response has been inferior to any other country’s.

*The first reported death in France was that of a Chinese tourist, and there were no other deaths reported for a week and a half, so I started the clock for France at the date of the second death.

The first reported death in China was on January 11, but the Worldometer data starts on January 21 (Jan. 22 on the chart for China, but you can get the data for Jan. 21 by subtracting the new cases for January 22). That’s why China’s curve starts at Day 10.