Post #553: Updating Post #550, the week ahead

Posted on March 16, 2020

In Post #550, I presented the results from:  “The United States Is Not a Coronavirus Outlier”, by Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones.  In a nutshell, most western countries appear to be following the same trend line that Italy set, in terms of number of cases.  I.e., they all have about the same growth rate in terms of confirmed coronavirus cases.

Here, I crudely update a snapshot of Drum’s graph, using today’s (Monday 3/16/2020, 5 PM EDT) update of the Johns Hopkins coronavirus map.  I can’t update the figure for Italy (currently about 22,000) because it would be off this chart.  For the rest, the observations remain close to the predicted trend based on Italy’s experience.  Today’s numbers are shown as black bars:

US and Germany are a little above the projected trend, Switzerland and France are right at the trend, and Great Britain remains somewhat below the predicted trend.

The upshot is that we should expect to have about 10,000 confirmed cases in the US by this Sunday.  We remain on track for that.