Day 32: Is this Data Any Good?

• COVID-19 Report As of Thursday, April 16, 2020 GA DPH 7PM
• Confirmed COVID-19 Cases: 16,368 (+1,381) ▲
  • Consecutive day #0 of decreasing growth (14 needed) ▲
  • Daily Growth Rate: 9.3% (+3.8%) ▲
    • Double Number of cases every 10 days ▲
  • Average Growth Rate (7-Days): 6.5% (+0.3%) ▲
  • % of Population Affected: 0.1565% (+0.0133) ▲
• Estimated Numbers
  • Total Infected (Est.): 163,680 (+13,810) ▲
  • Contagious, No Symptoms (Est.): 127,684 (+10,710) ▲
  • Contagious Ratio (Est.): 12 in every 1,000 Georgians (+1) ▲
• Hospitalized: 3,260 (+338) ▲
  • Beds Available: 8,322 ✓
• Deceased 617 (+65) ▲
  • Morbidity Rate: 3.75% (+0.08%) ▼
• ▼= getting better; ▲= getting worse; ✓ = same

For so long now, I could always look to a declining average growth rate for some good news. Today that trend ended with a 0.3% increase. Fig 1 (orange line). If you check out the daily numbers (above) almost everything is getting worse today. Whether this is the actual fact, or the result of some lazy number data, we will never know. If you read my late update to my Day 31 post, you read that at least in one county, the death numbers reported by DPH were jacked up. Hall County went from 1 death too low based upon local reports (0) to 5 in an afternoon. While that is possible, it took over a week for DPH to report the first death and as far at The Gainesville Times knows, nobody reported the other 4 deaths. This is not rocket science, and I get that they are reporting the total as it is known at the time of the report, but come on. This IS life and death we are talking about here, not some meaningless PowerPoint presentation you need to finish so that you can go to Dairy Queen. This problem reminds me of the quip about telling time. If you ask a man wearing one watch what time it is, he is absolutely sure of the time (even if his watch is wrong), but if you ask a guy wearing two watches, he has no idea what time it is because even the best watches are not exact. We have 159 watches. In reality, we suppose the totals provided today are close, but likely the total contains reports from a unknown number of previous days, some corrections, and a math error or two. So the change from one day to another is probably unknown. By anyone. And that is a problemo grande.

Today the President repeated what I wrote about Scientific American earlier about returning to normal. Georgia needs 14 continuous days of decreasing numbers of new COVID-19 virus to move to Phase II. What is Phase II? It is not important since we haven’t gotten to 1 consecutive day of decreasing new COVID-19 cases yet. But I bet Phase II is better than this. When we get to 13, I will take a look and see.

The Governor says that our COVID-19 number should top out around May 1, 2020! 15 more days of this just until it gets as bad as it is going to get? I’m not sure that anybody wants to hear that prediction. I’m not sure that you want to see my prediction for May 1, either. I sure don’t.

Many people are wondering if this COVID-19 thing is really just some government BS. After all, the sun is still out. The power is on. The Internet is still working. The grocery stores are about fully stocked on everything except toilet paper. (Google this economic problem to see why it is not likely to get better in the near future.) Gas is plentiful and cheap. There are no Russians parachuting from the sky. Therefore, there must be no problem!? Most often I hear that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu. Well that is incorrect. The seasonal flu morbidity rate is around 0.1% while as of today, COVID-19’s morbidity rate is 3.75%. That means that COVID-19 is 37.5 time more deadly than the seasonal flu. (Sorry for the lack of links, but it is late and you can Google it.) If everyone in Georgia got the “vid,” then you would expect 393,750 people to die. In the US, the total expected loss of life would be 12,307,500! We can’t let that happen, so we sit in our houses and social distance, and pray when we are released that some place with good food is still in business to feed us, and a theatre is there to entertain us, and a ball park is there for sport, and someone will need our services for work. If not, we will start all over again and maybe do something even more remarkable. After all, we are Americans and we are pretty damn awesome. Business will be back, but it won’t be back to normal. Business will be back to America extra special.