Some hopeful developments

[sholio]

Like most of us, I've been obsessively checking coronavirus news, and while the overall and US numbers continue to be terrible, one thing that I am finding increasingly hopeful is the New York Times infographics on the spread of the disease.

They have a well-designed and frequently updated page for US cases and for world cases, here and here:

Cases in US

World cases

It took them a while to straighten out how they wanted to display this data (for a while it kept changing, often in strange ways; at one point you could only see Europe and Asia on the world map, for example, and then it switched to a map that showed growth but not number of cases) but at this point they have quite a nice display that shows total cases, how fast it's growing in each country, and a graph for each country and each state that shows growth over time.

What I am finding really hopeful about these graphs is that very nearly all of them are showing that growth seems to be slowing down. This is still quite a lot of new cases in places that have a lot, but even the worst-hit locations are, for the most part, down from every-3-days doubling to every week or less.

There may be mathy reasons why this isn't as positive as it seems (I mean, it's still a lot of new cases a day, and it's still probably vastly underreported due to limited testing) but it looks very hopeful to me. I know that around here, after accelerating hard in the beginning, it's slowed way down - here in AK, we only had 5 new ones yesterday, down from 16-17 per day a week ago. I've been keeping a spreadsheet of our local cases because I wanted to a) compare actual growth to projected growth, and b) figure out the likely number of cases 1-2 weeks ago to guess at the probable odds of being exposed, and the actual numbers are already way below my guestimate numbers when I first started keeping track a little over a week ago.

Comments

[ducened]

I have this COVID-19 website on a tab now. It tracks historical and projected cases as well, and also estimates when the peak case load in either the entire US or else by state will happen. I find it rather reassuring, in a grim sort of way.

[sholio]

Oh right, I came across that one via Facebook a few days ago! (LOL, I typed "a few weeks ago" by accident. WELL IT FEELS LIKE IT.) And actually I am pretty sure that the projected peaks have now moved up by at least few days from where they were when I first looked. I distinctly remember our projected peak was in the last week of April (like April 24 or something) and now it's April 15.

Things are obviously still scary and grim, but I think they're also noticeably improving from the grimmest estimates, which means they may improve still further by the time we get to those peaks.

[ducened]

Days, weeks, years, months... Who can tell anymore on this, the forteventh of Marpilmay?

[sholio]

LOLSOB. XD

[rachelmanija]

I find South Korea extremely encouraging. This isn't going to last forever.

[sholio]

I know! And honestly, even more than that, I think it's really hopeful for me to watch the countries on the global map turn from red to orange to light orange again. There are almost no red hotspots right now, as opposed to most of Europe being a red hotspot a week ago. South Korea was doing a lot of things that other countries aren't doing, but what the map is showing now is that there are a lot of different ways to get there, whether it's a total lockdown like Italy, or extremely widespread testing like Germany, or even a partial lockdown like Sweden. In other words, even countries that didn't start early and aren't testing widely can get a handle on it, as long as people take social distancing seriously, and it's incredibly hopeful to see the actual stats bearing that out.

[pauraque]

Me too!

[kore]

Yeah, it seeeems to be getting a little better here. I'm sure there's cases we don't know about and the health care workers are getting sick and have almost no PPE, but I'm hoping the hospitals don't get overwhelmed, which seems to be the first domino in the nightmare cascading scenarios.

I think in Italy the death rates and the number of people in critical condition who need to be hospitalized are not increasing, which is another scrap of really good news. Maybe.

[sholio]

You guys are flattening the curve like a BOSS down there. :D I mean, yes - this is not to say things are great, the hospitals are really overloaded and it's still pretty scary and cases will continue going up for the near future. We're definitely not out of the woods. And I know this is easy for me to say because I'm not currently in one of the harder-hit places, and I know I'm incredibly lucky because of that.

... but it's working! And it's not just working a LITTLE, it's working a LOT. You can really see the difference, not just in a few places, but almost everywhere. Like I was saying in a comment above, the most hopeful thing of all, for me, is seeing all that bright red vanish from the world map as the growth curve of new cases slows down.

[ivyfic]

Unfortunately, at least some of that is that we’ve maxed out testing capacity here in New York. This is actually an interview with my dad about that. He runs the Northwell laboratory system.

[sholio]

Yikes. :( Thank you for the correction!

[ivyfic]

Yeah—he’s been updating us (charts and all), but since he gave an interview, I can send around.

[yalumesse]

I've been trying hard to timebox my reading time about this; I've been using this one from John Hopkins University to keep an eye on the worldview, which may or may not be too similar to yours to compare.

I think it is getting better, in no small part because of the places that have flatly shut down all transport to flatten the curve. It's going to be a long few months (at least...), but I think we'll get through this okay.

[sholio]

Yeah, I need to try to limit my reading about it because otherwise it's just a constant diet of stress. I do feel like the signs, on the whole, are more hopeful than I was expecting at this point, even if it's still extremely dicy and scary in many places.

[scioscribe]

It's really encouraging to have some relatively good news--it's just nice to see signs of this all going in the right direction.

[sheenianni]

In Czechia we're about to start easing some of the "anti-COVID" measures.
On one hand, YES PLZ I WANT MY LIFE BACK. OTOH, as good as it sounds, I really worry it's too soon and things could get out of hand really fast.
We've had it relatively "good" so far, but the Italian scenario is still there as a warning what happens when you underestimate this thing...