Abbreviated Coronavirus dashboard for April 23: New York accounts for ALL of the US’s progress
Abbreviated Coronavirus dashboard for April 23: New York accounts for ALL of the US’s progress
No big changes today, and since a picture is worth 1000 words, let me let the graphs speak pretty much for themselves.
1. Daily infections for the US as a whole continue to look like they are trending slightly down (but more on that below):
Figure 1
2. The 7 day rate of new infections remains stuck at +4%. There is very little evidence of this rate of increase slowing:
3. The trend in deaths has not peaked:
4. California cleared a big backlog in testing yesterday, which is why the number of tests spiked and the ratio of positive tests to total tests sharply declined:
5. BUT – when we look at the 7 day rolling average of new daily infections, New York State has steeply declined, by over 33%, from a peak of 9,651 on April 9 to 6,205 yesterday:
6. By contrast, during that same period the decline for the entire US has only been a little *under* 3,000 new infections daily, from 30,747 to 27,754:
(H/t Department of Numbers for graphs #5&6)
7. Which means that the 3,400+ decline in NY accounts for *more* than the entire decline in the US, I.e., ex-NY new infections have continued to *climb* slightly over the past 2 weeks. Not good at all, and certainly not a basis for any “opening up” of the economy.
You really need the number of daily new infections to be blow about 2000 before you can open up. That is because you have to be able to test the whole neighborhood of new infections.Only a few countries have pushed their number of new infections low enough – China, South Korea, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic.
Opening at or near the maximum is the worst time to open up. Your hospitals are at maximum strain and the number of carriers is high. (The really important number for this is not the number of new infection it is the number currently infected).