Day 36: GIGO (Garbage In; Garbage Out); Updated with Gov. Kemp’s Press Conference

• COVID-19 Report As of Monday, April 20, 2020 GA DPH NOON
• Consecutive day #0 of decreasing growth (14 needed) ▲
• Confirmed COVID-19 Cases: 18,947 (+646) ▲
  • Daily Growth Rate: 3.7% (+1.2%) ▲
  • Weekly Growth Rate: 5.2% (-0.5%) ▼
  • % of Population Affected: 0.1809% (+0.0065) ▲
  • Hospitalized: 3,550 (+86) ▲
  • Deceased 733 (+46) ▲
    • Morbidity Rate: 3.86% (+0.11%) ▲
• Estimated Numbers
  • Double Number of cases every 27 days (was 40) ▲
  • Total Contagious: 151,576 (+5,168) ▲
  • Contagious but Out & About: 148,026 (+5,082) ▲
  • Contagious Ratio: 14 in every 1,000 Georgians (was 14) ▼
• ▼= getting better; ▲= getting worse; ✓ = same

UPDATE: The Governor reported around 1630 today that the numbers of people reporting to emergency rooms has been declining and that Georgia is ready to move to Phase II. (Later he said not Phase II quite yet, but heading in that direction.) I’m not saying he is wrong, but I am saying that either he is wrong or the numbers released by DPH have been wrong, but they are not both right. I trust the Governor over the wonky numbers posted online. The Governor wants to reopen the closed business types by this Friday, April 24, 2020 but these businesses will have to adapt their practices to COVID-19 standards. Examples are gyms and salons. Theatres and in-dining can restart on Monday, April 27, 2020, but again using COVID-19 standards. Churches are back in business but following social distancing. Bars, nightclubs, amusement parks, concerts are still not allowed to reopen for now. The Shelter-in-Place will expire for most Georgians (not medically fragile or elderly) on Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 2359. The Governor also talked about a new smartphone application that can be used to report symptoms and get routed to a testing site. (I will add that this is what the Chinese did in real life with COVID-19 and what everyone did in a scary fiction book I read named Pandemic. They say that with our permission, they will use our location data to assist in contact tracing. I suspect that if you don’t consent, then they will get a warrant, but that is better than what the Chinese were doing. Despite all of that, it would get near instant information about new problem areas to presumably the right people to do something about it.) The Air Force Academy sent undergraduates home and kept seniors at the school. Graduation had the students 6 feet apart (all directions) in chairs on the football field, so this can work over the near term. This is a statewide mandate so every little fiefdom can’t make up their own rules to confuse everyone. If there is a local problem, they will need to get the Governor involved. I’m not big on big government, but I have to agree that if we allowed 159 different solutions, we would have a mess like we started with. More details are to come. Georgia has been pretty reasonable compared to other states thanks in no small part to Governor Kemp, so I expect more of the same. He is really a nice, down-to-Earth, person if you have not met him, and he is making hard decisions under unprecedented pressure. When I say unprecedented, I mean that this COVID-19 makes every other disaster ever pale in comparison. I just hope that we don’t see a jump in the numbers as a result, but I expect that we will if everyone does not play along with the rules. I’m afraid, the numbers that the Governor is looking at is from the University of Washington. See Fig 3. Their model shows deaths going down from today onward. I just don’t see how that is going to happen based upon the numbers published today by DPH. But I will remain optimistic.

If you have ever been a programmer, then you are familiar with the GIGO acronym. Apparently daily figures are from some day, not just from yesterday, and making decisions based upon the daily numbers is just silly. The weekly average is still going down and that is good news. Fig 1. Everything else is getting worse today (red). The total estimate is still tracking pretty well at least a day in advance. Fig 2. Predicting tomorrow might not be that big of a trick, but I’m not an epidemiologist, so I will take what I can get. The trend is still going up. While not on a graph, my death estimate of 740 was off today by 7 and the actual experts were off by 6. See Fig 3. I don’t like that the morbidity rate has gone up closer to 4%. Each time it creeps up that means that more Georgians have (and will) pass away because of this virus than before.

Like riding a rollercoaster, I keep waiting for the top. But all we seem to get are the little ups and downs leading up.