WUHAN VIRUS DAILY UPDATE FOR MAY 8
ALL INDICATORS POINT TO DECLINE - YET DEATHS REMAIN HIGH. The absolute death total for today is approximately the same as last Friday. With all the "truing up" of data, it's hard to know what to believe. The major hot spots, NY & NJ are clearly going down. The other states (especially those in their vicinity) that have been identified as potential hot spots continue to report slightly higher numbers.
USA Deaths bu State by Day
Can we believe these numbers to be accurate? Are these the second curves we've been warned about? All the other indicators indicate no. Remember the Rx graphs we showed before indicating the trends across all the states that was revised upwards? Here's that chart a month ago:
rt.live - Rt Across All States - 4 Weeks Ago
Scary stuff! Well here is that same chart today:
rt.live - Rt Across All States - Today
46 states out of 50 are below the 1.0 line and ALL are in decline. So how come deaths aren't dropping at a similar rate? This is how herd immunity starts happening. Note that it doesn't really matter which states are open or closed.
What does this mean? Well we've either plateaued and it's going to take longer for things to fall or we're going to see a fall come faster and the curve drop because, frankly, the state governments and hospitals are running out of dead bodies to use to inflate their numbers. I'm voting for the latter. Sadly we aren't really gonna know until next Tuesday at the earliest because the weekend is upon us and the numbers will be low for two days then spike up again.
Our new total for incidents is 1,275,916 (+27,779), an increase of 2.23% over the previous day (-0.27% from yesterday). Deaths have totaled 71,762 (+1,760) which is an increase of 2.51% - definitely the wrong side of 2% that I was hoping for by today - (-1.57%) over the previous day. Since the peak in Mar 19, rates of growth for incidents has fallen by 49.41% and for deaths has fallen by 40.34%. There were 303,411 tests completed with a 9.16% positive rate.
My bet is May is still going to see a major drop.