DAILY WUHAN-VIRUS UPDATE FOR MARCH 19th
Big big news! Total cases jumps 51.64% to 11,723 in one day - and that's a GOOD THING (TM)! See the next paragraph for why that is. Deaths jump a record 42.86% (total of 160) and that's not so good - but, still keeps us on trend for a death rate under 1% this month.
I've just now had a chance to review the details of the data. So - it turns out that the day before there had been a total of 27,450 additional tests processed across America. This latest data point comes from a total of 103,945 tests processed now that the new testing capacity is coming online!!!
That 42.86% rate of increase in deaths is still big and it does most likely reflect time of incubation and then succumbing to the virus. So this is a real value in context of the original data stream. But you'll note that it's a 10% smaller increase than the increase in incidents. Most or potentially even more than that 10% bump in incidents comes from newly discovered pre-existing cases detected by much wider test results.
I've been reading that for other world-wide data collection, approximately 10% of tests are coming back positive. This presumably also covers Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. If that is the case then tomorrow should catch another set of pre-existing unknown cases but we'll then be pretty much inline with what has occurred outside of America and our rates of growth should start falling shortly thereafter. Otherwise - either the 10% positive average is bogus information or America is seeing a different infection behavior than the rest of the world.
Unfortunately the data outside of America in most places is kinda all over the place. Taiwan, Japan, and Korea seem to have executed the most effective testing model thus far and, given the density population in their major cities, they could provide a model for our hardest hit places like Seattle, NYC, NJ, and LA.
We REALLY need wider test results to have confidence that our understanding of the virus is correct and that it's behaving as we expect. That's getting poured on us now which is excellent news. Still - most people getting tested are already symptomatic I suspect. Will be even better when just anybody and everybody can get tested every couple of weeks if they want. That allows us to really pinpoint who needs to be isolated and what level so that the world economic engine can get started again and we can minimize the inevitable and more dangerous 2nd and 3rd order effects.