Covid 5/14: Limbo Under

Previous weekly reports: Covid-19 5/7: Fighting Limbo, Covid-19 4/30: Stuck in Limbo

Slowly, a nation partially reopens. Is it too much, too soon? It’s too early to know for sure, because of lags, but so far we’ve only seen extraordinary good news. If you don’t think what we saw this past week was good news, either we disagree about how to read the data quite a lot, or you had what I consider highly realistic expectations.

Remarkably little has happened in the last week. There are weeks when decades happen, and previous weeks have felt like that. This one didn’t. This felt like waiting for things to happen and nothing happening except good numbers. Yes, we got some other news, but did any of it matter or surprise much? I would say that it did not.

Last time I did a bunch of analysis and a bit of editorializing alongside the numbers. This time I’ll keep it brief. This is mostly to get the charts out. I’ll get the other stuff out there in distinct posts if it’s worth saying.

The Data

Deaths:

	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NE ex-NY	NY
Mar 19-Mar 25	116	67	111	84	203
Mar 26-Apr 1	347	477	502	454	1340
Apr 2-8	639	1335	1150	1783	3939
Apr 9-15	895	2106	1472	3261	5345
Apr 16-22	1008	2369	1730	5183	3994
Apr 23-29	1135	2500	1684	4285	2810
Apr 30-May 6	991	2413	1737	5349	2007
May 7-May 13	1044	2344	1679	4014	~1500*

*- New York includes ~700 reclassified deaths that did not take place this past week, but were instead from past weeks and added to the death count on 5/7. I’ve subtracted them out for purposes of this chart.

Positive Tests:

	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NE ex-NY	NY
Mar 19-Mar 25	5744	6293	7933	8354	28429
Mar 26-Apr 1	15684	20337	24224	34391	52901
Apr 2-8	19455	31148	39618	56772	65604
Apr 9-15	16291	29267	35570	61921	64463
Apr 16-22	20065	34130	33932	64669	43437
Apr 23-29	21873	42343	33773	62189	42475
Apr 30-May 6	23424	49205	37880	51693	24287
May 7-May 13	22615	43264	37591	40209	16683

Overall test counts:

	USA tests	Positive %	NY tests	Positive %
Mar 19-Mar 25	347577	16.2%	88882	32.0%
Mar 26-Apr 1	728474	20.2%	117401	45.1%
Apr 2-8	1,067,220	19.8%	144273	45.5%
Apr 9-15	1,039,790	20.1%	160859	40.1%
Apr 16-22	1,253,535	15.7%	143970	30.2%
Apr 23-29	1,480,101	13.7%	202499	21.0%
Apr 30-May 6	1,733,601	10.6%	183446	13.2%
May 7-May 13	2,215,060	7.4%	202980	8.2%

The chart tell the story. We expanded testing dramatically and positive counts dropped in every region. New York continues to improve at a much faster clip than elsewhere, and some localities are seeing things get worse, but the overall trend is unmistakable. Positive counts fell in all regions while testing once again expanded substantially.

Deaths are not falling much yet, but they are a lagging indicator. Things are improving.

I don’t feel that much more confident in my priors than I did previously, but then I haven’t felt the need to update them either, in much of any direction.

New York will start its phase 1 reopening this coming week in four of its ten regions. It will likely expand that to seven to ten of them within two weeks. Restaurants come back in phase 3, which is four weeks in. It feels like normal is well on its way. I’m starting to feel much less paranoid, as my true estimate of infections per day in the state drops to 12,478 today, down from 20,200 a week ago. And also with my increased confidence in my infection modeling.

We also get baseball around July 4, assuming the players and owners can agree on how much the players get paid. That’s tricky in the best of times, but ultimately is probably settled one way or another. All theater from here, we hope.

I’m working on some other posts that will hopefully cover other angles.