I’m posting this table most every day now so people can see the changes in th enumbers from day to day. Only four states had over 100 deaths yesterday and most states are seeing their case and death rates taper off a bit. European countries are also seeing case growth slow.
Iceland Update
The chart above is similar to the ones I posted yesterday for Germany and others. The recovery data is being reported again and looks very reasonable. Looking at this as a cumulative flow diagram, we can see that Iceland is maintaining a 14-16 day cycle time for clearing new cases. This is obviously being largely driven by their scientific sampling techniques where they’re getting people who are sick tested and into quarantine right away. In nearly every case in Iceland, the recovery is occurring after the 14 days of isolation/quarantine. Looking at the stats below (from Iceland’s COVID-19 portal) this shows a 2.4% hospitalization rate with only 1/3 of those hospitalized needing to go into the ICU. Interestingly, over half of their cases are diagnosed while in quarantine. There were reports from a few days ago that I haven’t seen the raw data on that indicated that only 1% of those tested were coming back positive and that 50% of the confirmed infections were asymptomatic. This doesn’t quite make sense based on the data below, so more study may be needed. Still, what Iceland represents is a society that understands how COVID-19 is truly spreading and who is able to take steps more quickly than any other country to respond to an infection.
Summary: When thinking about what the real infection rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates might be, Iceland provides one of the only scientific answers. Keep in mind that Iceland’s numbers might not reflect the numbers from other countries completely due to the fact that they’re at a high latitude where most countries are reporting lower numbers. But the fact that they have over three times the number of active cases per 1000 people that the US currently has (4.4 per 1000 compared to 1.2 per 1000) while having nearly no deaths is very interesting.