With an increase of 812 reported cases today it is hard to see the COVID-19 “curve” for anything other than what it is–exponential growth. See Fig 1. You can see the same curve in the US data here. The daily percentage was down slightly today to 17% but the weekly average remains in the 20% range. See Fig 2. This rate is still doubling the reported cases every 5 days. That would put us over 10,000 cases by next Tuesday. And today, 5 in every 1,000 Georgians are contagious but not showing any signs of sickness. They may not even know that they are sick! So they wander around spreading the virus to others. I guess the good news, if any, is that 80% of the infected have no real negative effects. It’s the 20% that suffer. This number is UP again from 4 in every 1,000 yesterday.
The Governor has issued a stay-at-home order, and I can’t fault him based upon the numbers alone. Heck, I can’t even fault the Atlanta Mayor for tightening restrictions there (and I did not think she could do anything I agreed with). This graph predicts that Georgia COVID-19 cases won’t peak until 4/24/20 and that we will run out of hospital beds at least a week before that (the graphs default to the US, but you can select Georgia to see a state-by-state analysis). As bad as the death predictions are, they are unfortunately lower than the actual numbers we have today. If you want to see us compared to other countries, you can check out the graph here. My rudimentary estimates (Fig 1) still show exponential growth for the next couple of days. If we don’t stay home, we will all end up staying home longer and longer.
- Excited
- Fascinated
- Amused
- Bored
- Sad
- Angry