WUHAN VIRUS DAILY UPDATE FOR APRIL 3
After 7 consecutive days of our rate of growth dropping, we now have a small bounce. This does not mean the trend has ended. There are lots of reasons for this to happen. As a single data point, there's inherent latency day to day for when numbers come in which means some of yesterdays or tomorrows numbers show up today instead. That's why we use moving averages to identify trends and not the raw numbers. Also, we've been waiting for delayed numbers from California and other places to arrive which would account for this. We'll see as we go. Fortunately death rates of growth have now dropped 3 days in a row.
Our new total for incidents is 271,915 (+32,906), down to an increase of 13.77% over the previous day (up 0.37% from yesterday). Deaths have totaled 6,962 (+1,178) which is an increase of 20.37% (-2.70% rate of growth) over the previous day. Best news is that we got 139,474 new test results yesterday so our test capacity is increasing. But this is at least a week longer than I had anticipated and I've been completely unable to get any understanding about what the delay is all about or what the actual plan is to bring new testing online to the scale necessary to get a proper handle on things.
Still lots of progress needs to be made before we can call this thing officially in decline and under control. It's urgent that we close down the hotspots and dampen the places that are likely to become hotspots asap. Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea has quite clearly demonstrated that the most powerful tool in doing this is getting as much widespread testing going as possible. This has not happened and I haven't seen any explanation for why this is. Yes, we got a nice bump over the last two days but it isn't nearly enough and the government is not really selling a compelling story. People fear uncertainty and the lack of good information is starting to erode people's trust and willingness to follow the necessary preventative measures. One size does not fit all - not in a state, and certainly not in a country the size of America. We MUST get widespread testing in place immediately so we can intelligently focus our policy decisions and allow America to see a clear path to success and restoration of our economic engine - region by region, city by city.
I've personally got to complete some work that I'm being paid for and might block my colleagues progress if I don't have it ready on time. So long as I can do that, I will return to working on my new model with finer granularity to show the trend curves for various places around America. Hopefully I can make good progress.