WUHAN VIRUS DAILY UPDATE FOR MARCH 24
Major break through yesterday - for the first time since our model has made projections (since March 17) for rate of growth for incidents, the actual number has come in lower than the projection! If this holds then it means America has "crossed the line" and has started a declining trend confirming a peak on March 19. However, for some reason California has a larger backlog of tests without results yet and delays in their reporting could be a significant cause of this result if they have a larger percentage of positive tests. So let's watch closely the rest of this week and see what happens before we declare it a trend for sure. There are 63,675 (+22.52%) total known cases and 887 (+31.41%) deaths. Death rates also went down and have jigsawed since Mar 21 for an overall downward trend of -5% to its rate of growth which fits the behavior we expected given the incubation time of the virus.
We had projected 67,610 incidents and 743 deaths and a 1.10% projected mortality rate vs the 1.39% actual as of Mar 24. If I have time this weekend I will try to segment different states according to whether or not they are "hotspots" because, thus far, I've been reporting national averages and there really aren't any "average" states at all. 5 or 6 hotspots account for almost all the activity and we need to see if any of the low activity states are starting to show trends of upwards growth (thus running their own trend lines delayed by when the virus was originally introduced) or demonstrating stability by preventing the virus from getting a significant hold in those states.
Also, a thanks & shout out to Andrew Koenig who sent me this outstanding link of graphs that you can play with that appear to be seeing the same curves as what we've been reporting here. It's pretty well done so check it out : Covid Visualization I haven't had a chance to check out their data source yet but I will soon. Stay safe out there!