Day 24: Rate Decreased; Weekly Average Rate Continues to Decrease; Daily Total Down

After yesterday, I’m starting to see a weekly pattern in the data. Tuesday brings a spike that I was expecting Monday. Well, I bet the data gets there Monday, but is not published until Tuesday. So the weekend data inconsistencies are all shoved onto Tuesday. This sort of data shenanigans is going to play havoc with Step One in returning to normal–having 14 consecutive days of lower daily figures. The people collecting and reporting the data need to make sure it is accurate and timely.

Today we had 996 new total cases (infected plus deaths), and that is lower than yesterday. See Fig 1 (blue line). That still brings us to just shy of 10,000, which is above my estimates from Monday. The reported deaths went down to 33 from 100 yesterday (red line). The overall morbidity rate is now almost 4%. As of today, 7 of every 1,000 of Georgians are likely contagious carriers of COVID-19.

As you can see from Fig 2, below, the weekly average rate of increase has gone down to the lowest so far. The daily growth rate of 11% is also down. That is the good news. At this rate of growth, we will double the number of affected Georgians every 9 days or so. Nobody wants 20,000 Georgians affected by next Friday, April 17, 2020, but that is where we are presently headed. That is the bad news.

I have some other thoughts on this point, but the overall question is whether any solution is worse than the problem? Most people are simply ignoring best practices, so asking won’t work, and I’m not really big on demanding because that won’t work either. 96% of the people who get the virus will recover just fine. As people recover, they develop natural immunity. The confirmed case count goes up, up, up, but almost all of those infected recover in 14 or so days and we are on day 24 of the Presidential Quarantine, so almost all of those initial cases should come off the number of infected and move to the best category that we don’t track yet–immune. In fact, we want the number of immune people to be 100% if possible by acquired immunity of vaccination. Nobody likes what the Governor or the President is doing because there is no obvious solution except the one we are trying to avoid–384,300 deaths in Georgia. And there is little evidence that flattening the curve will lower this number but only that it will drag it out over a longer period of time. I suppose if we drag it out long enough to develop a cure/vaccine, then we can change the result. But it seems that we are in a “holding action” or a “war of attrition” where we are going to white knuckle this thing to the end. Hope, however, is not a strategy, nor an effective tactic. However, I feel like that is about what we have right now.

The damned Chinese Communists could not have done a better job disrupting the best economic growth the World has ever seen if they planned to do so. I don’t like Commies. I’m a cold warrior, and it is not something I can (or want to) shake.