Original graph from: “The United States Is Not a Coronavirus Outlier”, by Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones. Crudely updated (vertical lines) based on the 9 AM PM EDT update of the Johns Hopkins coronavirus map.
The Hopkins coronvirus site was busy last night, so this is an update from 9 AM today. Thus, it’s going to be a modest underestimate of the US data. Reported cases in the US and Germany continue to grow slightly above Italian trend. UK remains below trend. See prior posts for details on where I got this and what I’m doing.
On the downside, the US will likely hit 10,000 cases by COB today, which is where I had projected we would be this coming Sunday.
It appears too soon to tell whether Italy has hit the inflection point, that is, the point at which case counts continue to rise, but at a slower rate. (The point at which the daily increase in cases begins to fall.) Using data from 3/10/2020 to 3/18/2020 (yesterday), here are the daily increases in cases.
The source for this data is the coronavirus database maintained by Johns Hopkings via Github.
Here are similar charts for the US and Virginia. Obviously way too early to tell whether or not we’ve hit the inflection point yet, given the random day-to-day variation in the count. (And we probably should not hit it for another week or so, at best, anyway).
Edit: This graph was misleading so I removed it. Hopkins has now posted partially updated data for 3/19/2020 and we’re clearly still getting an increasing number of cases reported each day.
For Virginia, the daily count of new cases is just above the single digits. Total cases as of this morning, per Johns Hopkins map, is 79 total identified cases so far.
By contrast, to see what a known inflection point looks like, you can look at the historical data on daily increases in case counts in China. The upshot is that you really can’t say you’ve hit the inflection point until you’re well past it.
Source: a World Health Organization report on China’s experience with coronavirus (.pdf).
