COVID-19 Daily Update for 9/1/2020:

Blog Moved:

I have been posting my daily COVID-19 updates to my personal blog. But it now makes sense for this to have its own space. So I will be posting all future daily updates here. 

Web Page in Diapers:

We are creating a web page to house all the data analysis / modeling I'm doing for COVID-19. Right now it's in a very preliminary state, but I wanted to share the link now, before we clean it up. The link is likely temporary as well, since I expect we will eventually be using our own domain name. 

Link: https://jlc42.github.io/ 

Feedback is certainly welcome.

Estimating Infections From Cases and Positivity Rates:

Although this information is not yet available on the web page, I spent the morning generating figures with both confirmed cases, and estimated true infections, using the technique recommended by Youyang Gu.  

He proposed the following approach to estimate the true number of infections from the number of confirmed cases: 

true-new-daily-infections = daily-confirmed-cases * (16 * (positivity-rate)^(0.5) + 2.5)

You can browse the resulting figures from the git repo here: 

https://github.com/jlc42/jlc42.github.io/tree/master/figs/estimatedInfections

New Mexico is given as an example: 

As you can see, the likely number of true infections is much larger than the number of confirmed cases. 

I have also discussed a technique for estimating the number of true infections from the number of daily deaths here. So the next step will be to also plot these values for every region/state... and then to potentially combine the two techniques into a single estimate. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, so a combination is ideal.

The next step would be to re-display all that information in terms of the percent of the population infected, rather than by the raw number of infections, since that provides more useful information to people when it comes to determining their own risk levels. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-19 Daily Update, Public Health Compliance Data:

Image
Over the last week we have been talking about the mystery of second wave resistance across the US. After about 25% of the population is infected and recovered, there is remarkable resistance to a resurgence of the virus, even after states "reopen". This is mysterious because immunity thresholds should be around 66% if the R0 of SARS-CoV-2 is really around 3 as we believe. One likely explanation for this is that personal behavior is providing the additional protection. In the past I have used Google mobility data to characterize the level of physical distancing. But this only captures how much we are moving around, and can't capture how careful people are being. However, there is now some interesting polling data available that may capture some of these effects. Ryan Burge has provided excellent visualizations of the steps the American public is taking from the DFP COVID-19 Tracking Poll: (see: https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1301887909675569152/photo/1 ) Approximate
Read more

COVID-19 Daily Update: 200,000 dead in the USA

Image
 Today the USA passed 200,000 deaths.  World wide we are nearly at 1 million deaths.  Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/   Early predictions back in March were that between 100,000 to 200,000 people might die from COVID-19 in the USA if we did nothing.  We didn't do nothing. But what we did was just as ineffective.  Now over 200,000 are dead, worse than the worst of the projections. There is a narrative that these projections were wrong... too "high".  It turns out that they were actually far too low.  They were wrong, in other ways. The assumed fatality rate was too high in the early models, but they under-estimated how many would be infected. They over estimated how quickly the disease would decline, and they severely over estimated the quality of our response. We failed, beyond the wildest imaginings of the worst case models from March. 
Read more
Image
We now have data...  62% of registered voters in America think that the Capitol Riots are a threat to Democracy. 55% of independents see it that way. A full 27% of Republicans agree. That's a remarkable number who see protests by THEIR side as not only wrong, but a full on threat to democracy! That's incredible.  Only 21% of Americans actually support the treasonous riots at the Capitol. On the one hand, that's a staggeringly high number who are so deluded by conspiracy theories and delusional misinformation that they actively support treason. On the other hand, if Republicans were to "hitch their wagon" to such an unpopular position, it would spell their doom electorally.  Will they?  Well... only 45% of Republicans actually support the treasonous riots, meaning that the events at the capitol have split the Republican party bitterly... and almost in half. And it is not clear which half might come out "in control" of the Republican party long term. What
Read more