This is an update as of April 25th, 2020.
We are analyzing the existing available data on daily deaths caused by the SARS-CoV2 virus and use that in conjunction with certain simple models to predict the evolution of the disease in certain geographical areas. You can read the full introduction here.
Our focus is on three cases today.
The first one is California, which if you check the posts from few days ago, you would have seen that it was about to pass the peak. Surprisingly, if you look now, it shows again that it’s about 12 days before the peak. One might wonder what happened? You could have also seen few days ago that California was at a size more than 1 order of magnitude below New York, or France for example. That showed that the initial stages of the outbreak in California were not as widespread as in other regions that are racing towards heard immunity. What we see now in California is a second outbreak, focused more on the Southern part of the state and this time, the size of the outbreak is at about 0.013%. It is still smaller than what we see in New York, or France, but it’s more considerable.
The other interesting region to look at, and experienced a similar resurgence is Ireland. While the data for California is clean, the data for Ireland is more suspicious with an outlier spike that most likely is due to an error. This resurgence for Ireland is more likely a data glitch, like we saw a similar one for New York a little more than a week ago.
Lastly, we want to look a little closer to Washington, which is our home turf and we might have some more proximity-based information. Washington stands out as the place with the lowest outbreak speed by far among all the regions. We think that what happened here was that unlike places in Europe, or New York, where mass transit facilitated a fast and uniform spread of the outbreak before we had any casualties throughout the whole territory and they see heard immunity from the first outbreak most likely, Washington saw few regional outbreaks separated by a couple of weeks from each other. It first started in the Lynwood-Kirkland corridor in early February, moved quite fast to the sough reaching Issaquah and then about a week later it reached Snohomish and Whatcom county too. It took about 10 more days and it reached the Yakima, Benton and Franklin counties, where there was quite a high number of casualties compared to their low population density. More recently it started to affect Pierce and Clark counties that have quite a high number of people, but the spread there is low. Nevertheless, even with this low speed, the size in Washington is at 0.12%, and comparing to other regions that translated to a 20% to 40% on the way to heard immunity.
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