Stay Home & Listen

With the latest announcements and projections from the White House, now is an important time to take stock of the current situation and reassess how serious we are, collectively, about COVID-19. At least in my home state, it doesn't appear that many are taking guidelines set by the CDC seriously. I'm not entirely sure what our governor, Asa Hutchinson, is waiting on to take more action. In today's press conference, there seems to be little action described with more waiting and watching to do.

Just to be clear, I'm not a medical professional, but a data scientist. The great thing about being a data scientist is you can bounce around industries, apply similar and sound logic to the data, and then lean on the domain experts to do the rest. Along with the top link, you can see today's White House conference as immunologists and other health experts detail a model predicting 100,000 deaths in the next few weeks for the U.S. based on data from Italy. I am deeply grateful for the efforts of those like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx for giving the difficult news.

For my part, I can just help validate and track along with the released data. Now that we've entered into dangerous territory on U.S. soil, we can model several projections just based on our own historical data. This should never inform over health experts, but it does signal a few things. First, the chart: Actual total cases are indicated in blue, while an initial forecast is shown in dotted-red, and an updated forecast (3/29) in Yellow.

Actual numbers from https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

1. Actuals have stayed below the original forecast made on (3/23). This is good, as that forecast was aggressive.
2. Actuals for the past two days have met and slightly exceeded the newer forecast (3/29). This is not unusual given more data to work with, but the results are immediately alarming. We see a much more aggressive curve.
3. If we consistently hit the projections into and past the weekend, the curve starts to move beyond our control. The best case, I believe, is actual numbers will be met today through Friday, but begin to quickly fall short.

So what?

The curve is coming, and we are not currently on track to flatten it. Listen to the news, particularly the experts. Please don't just take the minimum precautions, but all advised. We will save lives by taking this seriously as a community, and my goal for this post is to try and show support for doing just that. I will update again with new data, and also plan to compare certain high-risk counties in a deeper dive.

Thank you.

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