The New Hotness

We now have enough statistics from the USA to draw some useful graphs, so click the Logarithmic options to make the charts comprehensible:

The penciled lines give an eyeballometric fit, but it’s pretty obvious the USA is now dealing with purely exponential infection rates.

Total Cases, which is the patients tested = people already in the medical system, is growing by a factor of ten every eight days. By next weekend, the USA will have one million Total Cases: average it to 112,000 new cases, every day, over the next eight days.

Which may not happen, if only because we may not have the intake / testing / recording capacity for that number of patients and maybe, just maybe, Social Distancing will have an effect. I expect the Total Cases line bend downward slightly during the week, but it won’t be anywhere near horizontal. Obviously, the extrapolation fails completely within the next 24 days, because we lack a factor of 1000 more people to infect.

Total Deaths still equals Total Cases with a delay of fourteen days. By next weekend, the USA will have 10,000 Total Deaths: ramping up to average 1120 new deaths, every day, over the next eight days.

The 9,000 patients who will die in the next week are already in the medical system (because you take about two weeks to die) and, at least in downstate NY, have essentially filled all available hospital beds; they’re getting the best care possible from the medical establishment.

The next 900,000 cases, appearing “suddenly” during the next eight days, have nowhere to go; doubling hospital capacity and converting every flat surface into a mass ward are worthwhile goals, but they’re a linear solution to an exponential problem.

Not every new case becomes a patient, but in the USA we seem to be testing only folks with obvious COVID-19 symptoms, so all the optimistic hospitalization estimates of 10% are off the table and 50% seems more believable. Pick any percentage you like.

Eight days from now, the rate will ramp toward 10,000 deaths per day, to reach 100,000 Total Deaths in sixteen days, again, as an average.

Nearly everybody will survive this pandemic, because the overall death rate seems to be a few percent. For those of us in the Boomer-and-up generations, (theme: Aqualung) well, this may be our contribution to solving the Social Security & Medicare budget problems.