Day 23: Damn.

The last 24 hours have been rough for Georgia. 1,500 new confirmed cases and 100 deaths. Both of those are off-the-chart numbers for us for the whole pandemic. In Fig 1, below, you can see the spike in new COVID-19 cases (the blue line) and you can where the new total of 8,818 went above all my estimates. The death rate is now over 3.5% with this large, 100-person, increase. 442 new people arrived at hospitals just yesterday. This hospital bed/ICU bed/ventilator number is the key resource restriction that experts have been worried about. See this page for more details (note that you will need to select Georgia for our specific information). Fig 2, below, is a screen shot of the resource restriction portion of the IHME page. As of today, 7 in every 1,000 Georgians are possible carriers of the virus.

Note that we have not achieved the first of four goals to lessen the shelter-in-place restrictions yet. We have achieved 0 of 14 days in a downward trend in new COVID-19 cases.

As promised, I’m going to leave my estimates made Monday in place on Fig 1 for the entire week. (NOTE: I realized that the red line exponential growth estimate had a math error that I corrected today in case you noticed the odd shape it had.) I might add in a line for the real expert estimates tomorrow for comparison.

Fig 3 shows the jump in percentage of growth (to 22%) while the weekly average remained lower, but only because last Tuesday’s 36% increase rolled off the average calculation. Our numbers are going in the wrong direction.