New Numbers

Last week, I had an embarrassment when a spike in total deaths on one day caused my projections of total deaths for May to spike by a factor of ten. But the next day they went back to about where they were the day before, because the day of the spike fell out of the three-day rate of change in daily deaths that I was using to project deaths going forward.

For this reason, I decided I shouldn’t be projecting daily deaths, but only the total deaths, which will be less volatile. I did a couple tests and decided I should use the three-day percent increase in total deaths (as opposed to the seven-day percent increase, which looks like it’s a little less accurate for forecasting). So all of the projections below are based on this new methodology.

I had also decided last week that there’s no point in projecting anything off of the total cases number, so I’m no longer estimating “set in stone” numbers over the course of the pandemic. Those were becoming ridiculously low; this is because reported cases are only a fraction of actual ones, and that fraction is getting smaller all the time, as far as I can see – almost certainly because of the ongoing huge shortage of testing capacity. So now I’m just showing reported cases and the daily rate of change.

I had moved last week to projecting deaths in weekly/monthly intervals, and I went all in on that today, with the table below. I decided just a couple days ago to start including May projections, and now I’ve added June. Why did I do that? Because it’s clear the epidemic in the US won’t be anywhere close to being ended in May – in fact, it will probably be going strong, if perhaps in fits and starts, through the rest of the summer. Various actions – or lack thereof – by our leaders have pretty well set that in stone.

Plus, I really don’t see any way we’ll escape having more than a million deaths over the course of the pandemic, absent a very drastic change at the top, and very soon. In other words, maybe it’s possible to keep the 3.5 million number on the last line down to close to 1 million. But it’s very hard to believe it will be anything lower than that, no matter what happens at the top.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous week/month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5	111%
March 21	244	35	542%
March 28	1,928	275	690%
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889	223%
April 11	12,126	1,732	95%
April 18	18,434	2,633	52%
April 25	21,188	3,027	15%
Month of April	77,528	2,584	1,910%
May 2	33,214	4,745	57%
May 9	48,463	6,923	46%
May 16	77,053	11,008	59%
May 23	120,785	17,255	57%
May 30	176,239	25,177	46%
Month of May	468,976	15,128	605%
June 6	280,213	40,030	59%
June 13	439,248	62,750	57%
June 20	640,913	91,559	46%
June 27	1,019,025	145,575	59%
Month of June	2,931,218	97,707	625%
Total March - June	3,481,779

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 39,014

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,867

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 5%  

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 20% (used to project deaths in table above)

II. Total reported cases

Total US confirmed cases: 738,923

Increase in cases since previous day: 28,651

Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 4%

Percent increase in cases since 3 days previous: 15%

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 68,285

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 39,014

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 36% (vs. 37% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 36% of them have resulted in death. Of course, this number will come down as time goes on and more cases are closed in which the victim recovered. But this number has gone down and up since Worldometers started publishing the recovery rate on March 26 (when it was 41%), and on about half the days, it’s gone up; there is still no sign of a downward trend, and other countries like Italy and France show comparable percentages.