Sunday April 5, 2020
Day 20 of the President’s Stay-at-Home Quarantine

First off, I want to give a shout out to the Almighty for a beautiful day today in North Georgia! If you were in a cabin in the woods without Internet or TV, you would think that the World was perfect today. No global warming to make it too hot, no global cooling to make it too cold. The air is clean, the water is pure. Traffic noise is almost gone. Birds are singing. Nobody shooting at you or telling you what to do at the point of a gun. If you lucky to be quarantined with the right person/people who are uninfected, then it is a perfect day. Nobody wants to be at work on a day like today anyhow! (Sorry to all those first responders who are risking life and limb for the rest of us.)

I don’t want to jinx things, but the change in the rate of change (got that?) is looking like we are nearing the top of the curve. However, I was fooled by a good couple of days once before (on March 27-30), so I will be cautiously optimistic now. See Fig 1 for a view of the continued downward trend. Use caution, because data collection over the weekends has been uneven in the past. Fig 2 shows Sunday’s data with Saturday’s predictions so you can see how my rudimentary model is holding up. Full disclosure, I did Saturday’s and Sunday’s numbers on Sunday, but I used the same math and did not “cheat” to make the predictions better. You can see from Fig 2 that Sunday’s numbers came in at the low end of the predicted range (the yellow line indicating the average growth). Only 3 deaths were reported, which is 29 LESS than I anticipated with a death rate hovering a quarter point over 3%. The overall data show that the increase in COVID-19 cases was the same as the average increase per day for the whole epidemic. Another day like that tomorrow, and we could be at, or nearing, the peak. Fig 3 shows Sunday’s data with an estimate for Monday and Tuesday.

Fig 1
Fig 2
Fig 3

The U.S.A. as a whole is still on an exponential increase path and not matter how well Georgia does, we are really in this together. If we don’t all kick this thing, then we will all get it. If we all get it, then 3% of us won’t make it. Nobody wants that.

UPDATE: I also got notification that the Union County Courthouse will be closed for a couple of days due to COVID-19 exposure.

UPDATE: I read an Army Times Story, where they are using smell to check for early signs of COVID-19 infection. Apparently, if you are infected, you lose your ability to smell things like vinegar. If you can’t smell vinegar, then you don’t get on post. Smelling vinegar can’t hurt you, and might end up being the test we all use. Like using a cross or garlic would be to check for vampires. 😉

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