Some hopeful developments
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.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1320448.html with
comments.
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.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1320448.html with
comments.