Day 19: First Day of Statewide Lockdown while Numbers are Down; 6 in 1,000 May Be Infected Up From 5 in 1,000 Just Yesterday

As you can see from the now-familiar COVID-19 rate change chart (Fig 1) the rate of increase today was way down and so was the number of new cases. Whew! This is the lowest average rate keeping the downward trend, thank goodness. This downward trend comes on day #1 of the state-wide stay-at-home order. This order supersedes all local and county ordinances. See below for a copy of the Executive Order that you can download. The total deaths are now at 198, but were 12 less than I expected by today. The daily increase was right in between the straight-line and exponential predictions where I expected it to be. See Fig 2. The estimates for tomorrow are shown in Figure 3. Unfortunately, this rate of change still means that we are doubling the number of infected every 6 days instead of every 5 days. That means by next Tuesday we could have almost 120,000 people infected. But I will be happy with what we have.

So now for the (regular) bad news. Making the usual assumptions I discussed in earlier posts, today there are 46,758 contagious Georgians who are showing no real symptoms. Worse, today, I read that 20% of those who are contagious don’t even have a fever. So that means that today there are 11,689 Georgians running around thinking that they are healthy, but they are really spreading the COVID-19 to everyone they contact. Doing the math yields that as of today, 6 in every 1,000 Georgians are positive for COVID-19. That is up from 5 in every 1,000 yesterday and 4 in every 1,000 from the day before. THIS number HAS to go down or we are going to be screwed.

Loading…

Taking too long?

Reload document

| Open in new tab

Download [354.10 KB]

I’ve heard that the Lumpkin Co. Courthouse will be closed for COVID-19 decontamination after an employee there was tested as positive. I also read that there is now 1 COVID-19 case in Union County, but it is in error as the person is a Towns County resident. With that new case, that leaves only 12 Georgia counties untouched by the virus today.

I’ve been looking at the model predictions that the Governor and other politicians have been using to make decisions. The total death estimate for today was 162 to 193 and the actual was 198. Their high-side estimate prediction was under by 5. They were closer than my prediction. The total death estimate for tomorrow is 183 to 230. I might start including their predictions overlaid on my actual chart in the future.