Day 28: Happy Easter! (I will wait until Tuesday to feel good about the numbers today, but check out that daily rate of change!)

• COVID-19 Report As of Sunday, April 12, 2020 GA DPH Noon
• Total Confirmed: 12,452 (+191) ▼
  • Consecutive day 2 of lower # of increases (14 needed) ▼
  • Daily Growth Rate: 1.4% (double # of cases every 71 days) ▼
  • Average Weekly Growth Rate: 9.5% (-0.4%) ▼
  • Total Infected (Est.): 124,520 (+1,910) ▼
  • Contagious, No Symptoms (Est.): 97,111 (-977) ▼
  • Contagious Ratio (Est.): 9 in every 1,000 Georgians ✓
• Hospitalized: 2,505 (+14) ▼
  • Beds Available: 8,322 ✓
• Deceased 433 (+1) ▼
  • Morbidity Rate: 3.48% (-0.13%) ▼
• ▼= getting better; ▲= getting worse; ✓ = same

The big story for today is the plummeting daily growth rate to 1.4%. Fig 1 (blue line). This is the lowest daily rate of change for the whole pandemic. This lower rate naturally brings down the weekly average, Fig 1 (orange line), and spreads out the doubling date to 71 days! If accurate, this Easter brings us two kinds of good news! All of these numbers look great today. Look at every down arrow in the summary above.

But as I allude to in the headline, reporting is uneven during the weekends and I expect this to be especially true on a high holy day like Easter. I’m expecting a jump on Tuesday to make up for the lack of reporting over the weekend and that will screw up the numbers. The bad news is that only two Georgia counties report no infections as of today. That is down from three on Saturday. But just look at the shape of the confirmed total graph in Fig 2! You can see the change in the growth rate there as well. The experts predict that we will hit the top of the curve sometime between April 27, 2020 and May 1, 2020 and we are still two more weeks away from there. I’ve been fooled twice before with the delayed data, so I guess I will wait until Wednesday to see what the numbers bring. But today, it looks like the the virus is slowing down.

Today marks the end of my weekly prediction. I will come up with a new set of predictions tomorrow. I will likely try to refine my prediction method somewhat, although my predicted path was much more narrow (less +/-) than the experts (they are using 90% confidence interval and I’m just spitballing), yet the actual data was mostly between the orange and yellow lines where I would expect it to be.