Happy Easter, everyone, and happy Passover for our Jewish friends.  Though I’m not quite sure if “happy” is right for Passover, any more than for Good Friday.  They are certainly momentous days, demonstrating the mighty power of El Shaddai to deliver His people from bondage, to Pharoah or to sin, and to save us from the Angel of Death.  I happen to believe them both, with all my heart.

It’s been almost a week since my last report on Death’s latest weapon.  I’ve been monitoring the reports daily, and there have been few changes in the trends, which are favorable in the sense that the worst of the COVID-19 epidemic seems to be over in many places, and close to over in our own country.

Thanks to a helpful hint from The Reticulator on Mark Hamilton’s post yesterday, you should now be able to click my graphs to enlarge them, if you wish.  Who says you can’t teach an old dog?

I.  Reported Deaths

The US reported 12,401 COVID-19 deaths this week, up from 7,152 last week.  In Western Europe, it was 26,736 this week, also up from 24,466 last week.

The US reported it’s worst day thus far on Friday, April 10, with 2,108 deaths reported.  Western Europe’s worst day was Tuesday, April 7, with 4,649 deaths reported.  (Remember that these are days on which the deaths were reported, not necessarily on which the deaths occurred.)

The daily figures are down somewhat in the last couple of days, to 1,557 in the US today.  We have seen minor dips before that preceded new highs, but at least there is a bit of encouraging news. 

On to the graphs, starting with total reported deaths per 100,000 population:

You can see that the general trends remain the same, with Spain and Italy at the top, France rising rapidly, the US quite low compared to the others, and Germany the most fortunate thus far.

Here is the graph of daily reported deaths per 100,000 population, which allows visualization of a possible “hump” for each country:

I took France out of this graph, because it has had very wide variations in daily reports which make the graph difficult to read.  There is an anomaly in Germany, which actually reported fewer deaths yesterday than on Friday and therefore had a negative daily figure.  I assume that this is a reporting issue.  It does look like Italy’s peak was around March 27, and Spain’s was around April 2.

You can see that the US reached a peak on Friday, and has declined since.  It is possible that Friday was the peak of the epidemic, but I’d want a few more days of data before I’d be confident about such a conclusion.

Here is the 3-day moving average in the percentage increase in total reported deaths:

You can see that the trend lines continue down in all countries, which is quite good news.  The US has actually dipped to 10%, from about 30% just 2 weeks ago.  France is in this graph, so you can see that the large daily anomalies that caused me to leave France out of the last graph to not have a significant effect on its downward trend line.

Here are the daily percentage increase in reported deaths, for just the US, Italy, and Spain (inclusion of all countries makes the graph too hard to read):

Here you can see the very low percentage increase in the US over the last 2 days, down to just 7.6% today.  As previously noted, daily reports fluctuate somewhat, so don’t draw too many conclusions from one or two days of reporting.  But again, good news as far as it goes.

II.  Reported Cases

Here are the graphs for reported “confirmed” cases, starting with total reported cases per 100,000:

Here is the same data in logarithmic scale, which helps you visualize the declining rate of increase.  Remember that in logarithmic scale, exponential growth will look like a line, so a downward curving trend line is what we want to see.

As before, I don’t see any significant change in any of these trend lines that would correspond to the implementation of lockdown measures.  It may be difficult to identify such a change, because of the variable number of days between infection and the emergence of symptoms.  The jagged line in France indicates some reporting issues, with unusually wide variations on a few days.

Here is daily reported new cases per 100,000 population:

You can see a downturn in the US over the past two days.  

Here is the 3-day moving average in the percentage increase in total reported cases:

As with the reported deaths, you can see a general downward trend line for all countries.  All countries and areas are now below 10% daily growth.

III.  My Comments

I am very puzzled by the progression of COVID-19, in two respects.  Well, more than two, but two that come to mind from the graphs above.

First, everything that we have been told — and my own common sense — suggests that reported cases and reported deaths should not be declining in tandem.  There is supposed to be a lag between cases and deaths, probably on the order of 2-3 weeks.  Yet we see no such lag.  The peaks of reported cases is occurring at about the same time as the peaks of reported deaths.  The growth rates in total reported cases and total reported deaths are closer than I would expect.

Second, there are very wide variations in the trend lines for a few countries, with some countries being strangely and inexplicably fortunate in having a low number of deaths compared to the number of cases.  This is most notable for Germany, and also noticeable for the US.

The US has about 168 reported cases per 100,000, which is about the same as Spain on March 29 and Italy on March 30.  Yet Italy and Spain had about 19 and 15 deaths per 100,000 on those dates, respectively, while the US currently has less than 7.  It is possible that this is a result of demographics (an older population in Italy and Spain), but Germany has slightly fewer reported cases per 100,000 than the US, and an even lower death figure (less than 4 per 100,000).  As I said, puzzling.

ChiCom delenda est.