Some BONUS Analysis of the Wuhan-virus from W.A.C.O. HQ!
Lots of people have been comparing America's situation to Italy's so I thought I was check and see what, if it does correlate, that might mean for America.
Italy's rate of growth of new incidents peaked on March 7th at 27% and has declined to 14.5% today. The US/Italy incident alignment puts that date as early as March 18th and as late as March 23rd for when that point should hit. Given the sudden surge of new test capacity that's been brought online, however, we won't see such a reduction in the raw data quite as soon. However, we will know that it has peaked when we see the rate of growth for the death percentages stop declining and start going up. So let's see if that phenomenon happens prior to March 23rd or not.
Now to the doomsayers - what if it doesn't peak? Well the worse case theoretical scenario with current rolling average rates is that by April 23rd, 100% of Americans will be infected and 240,000 dead. Now we know that's not even mathematically possible so the peak will happen well before then. At current rates, fully 1% of Americans will have it by April 8th with 10,000 dead. Also an incredibly unlikely outcome - although the 10,000 dead is actually quite probable before we're done. We will certainly hit 1000 dead by March 28th.
So - what we're looking out for is either the rate of growth for incidents to start to decline, or the rate of growth for deaths to start to increase. Both will be a strong indication of a peak in the pandemic hopefully prior to March 23rd. A few days after we see this phenomenon we should be able to start making projections as to how it all plays out in the end.
My bet is that things start loosening up by May and we should be in the clear for most of America by June. This last statement is not backed by any rigorous analysis, however, so it's strictly my personal opinion.