March 28th Updated Thoughts on COVID-19

As I wrote previously, in my March 25th thoughts here, the data in Italy seemed to suggest a flattening, or a decrease in the acceleration of viral spread. I've also wrote about the lag between new case identification and deaths being about two weeks based on looking at China and S.Korea data and so in a situation where testing is extensive, you would expect new cases to flatten before new deaths.

On March 27th, The Guardian published this report on what's going on in Italy and drawing the conclusion that a spike in deaths in the past 24 hours would "Seemingly dashing hopes that the rate of infection might be flattening there". I don't believe this is the right interpretation and I'm still holding the view that the new case data for Italy indicates flattening.

March 21st was the last time Italy set a new high for the number of cases and the data on March 27th indicates we have not exceeded that high yet.

Why are we looking so closely at Italy? Because it was on March 9th that they implemented a nation wide lockdown for the population of 60 million. It was also one of the first such lock downs in the west. To set a peak in new cases 12 days after lock downs were implemented is encouraging. Some of our lock downs in the US started on March 13th and the Presidents 15 day lock down started on March 15th.

Remember, again that our new case data is still woefully inaccurate, so we are relying on "new deaths" to indicate a flattening (which lags new cases). I still expect to see a peak established in "new deaths" rates by March 30th to perhaps the first week in April for the US. If this holds true and the comparison to Italy holds, than we are currently in our peak period of new cases (whether the new case data shows it or not).

More extensive lock downs in the state of WA started on March 25th, but were announced and started to be implemented on March 23rd. One of the things I wanted to start taking a closer look at, is the metrics for the State of Washington. The federal government doesn't have any real power to lift restrictions for any given state. A decision for things starting to be lifted in Washington will come from state officials looking at state data as well as the broader US data.

One of the encouraging things going on here is that our rate of spread in WA is significantly less than the broader United States. Our rate of infection and viral spread has trended behind the broader US even though Washington was ground zero.

Our new deaths are still increasing though, but I'm hoping our peak will show up clearly in the data over the next week. There's also a lot of statistical noise in our lower volume of data, requiring some smoothing of data points to be able to see trends more clearly.

But what can we expect to see going forward? This is the question everyone is attempting to answer. The UW just published a new study attempting to predict the peak new deaths for the State of Washington. They predicted the peak would come on April 19th and a peak new deaths of 27. Ironically, the day this was released (March 27th), the new deaths in the state jumped to 28.

My method for attempting to figure out and discern the future will be to figure out how to compare Italy to the US and to WA and how to apply their current trends to our future. Next article.