I’m entering this late on 3/20 because most of the world’s data is already in. Some interesting things to discuss. First off, we saw a huge spike in Active cases in NY on 3/20. I can only hope that this spike is an anomaly and that we won’t see more like it in the US. You can see this in the bar chart showing change in the last 24 hours, but also in the time series chart immediately following. While we may have hopes that Washington and New Jerseys outbreaks MIGHT be slowing, it is clear that NY continues to accelerate.
As for the rest of the world, you can see in the chart below that Italy continues to accelerate as well. They announced around 6K new cases yesterday and over 600 new deaths. France and Spain also announced ~200 new deaths. One bright spot as an American, though, is that New York’s death rate is extremely small compared to the number of cases. When normalized by the total number of cases, it is far below that of the large European countries and even smaller ones like Switzerland.
Finally, here’s something interesting to watch. I’m looking for any country at all that might be recovering from their initial outbreak. I’ll be watching Japan for the next week or so to see if their recovery cycle-time matches the ~20 days that we saw in the Hubei province data. That might become really interesting data. Note that around the 200 case mark, we see the horizontal distance between the Confirmed line and the Recovery line is now measurable (looks like roughly 22 days. If the recoveries accelerate, then we may see a consistent 20-25 day cycle-time eventually.
Thank you!