Must have been a lot of testing. US count doubled yesterday. Everything except China showed up as higher than projected infection rates. US and TX death rates are still low. Italy death rates are still high. Here are the numebers for 2020-03-19. Today’s numbers release sometime in the next 2-3 hours.
Where Cases Deaths Recovered Mort/A Mort/R World 242,713 9,867 84,962 4.07% 10.41% China 81,156 3,249 70,535 4.00% 4.40% NonPRC 161,557 6,618 14,427 4.10% 31.45% Italy 41,035 3,405 4,440 8.30% 43.40% US 13,680 200 108 1.46% 64.94% Texas 260 1 0 0.38% 100.00%
Today’s numbers release sometime in the next 2-3 hours. The estimates for today’s numbers (03-20) are 274102/11148 WW; 81210/3257 PRC; 195048/7975 NON; 47150/3893 IT; 24034/339 US; 391/8 TX
Data source is Johns Hopkins University repository here:
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series
Projections are just Excel, divide today by yesterday to get the change day to day, then use a 7-day average to guess what tomorrow might be, and do that again for each row.
In the US, first and second hand reports show that people are tested for seasonal influenza first, and if they test positive, they are not tested for SARS-2. This is conserve the the limited number of tests. It’s less likely for people to have both COVID19 and influenza at the same time. This may change as testing capability increases. According to Trump, Rosche, Quest, Labcorp, and Wal-Mart may be rolling out rapid testing capability starting in April.
In the US, it looks like the confirmed cases are about 13% of the actual infected. The actual death rate for non-overwhelmed places tends to be about 4.5% of the confirmed cases, when there’s ~14% testing (PRC and WW average).
The real mortality rate will therefore be that much less, which puts it in the same order of magnitude as seasonal influenza, but without the ability for people to get vaccinated, and a higher infection rate due to longer infectious incubation period.
