Germany on the Mend

Good news out of Germany, seeing two consecutive days of significant improvement in the number of active cases. Additionally, the number of new cases is trending downward as well (after accounting for the regular weekly ebb and flow). Switzerland also continues a slow and steady improvement. In addition, Spain and Italy are very close to halting their growth. Overall, very good news in Europe. Canada, UK, and US numbers are all continuing on a 7-9% growth rate. In the Mideast, Iran's numbers are encouraging, but we must take their reports with a grain of salt. Conflicting numbers continue to surface, particularly around the reported number of deaths.

Unfortunately, there are no new stay-at-home orders in the US. In fact, Kansas Republican lawmakers weakened the order in their state, deciding that their governor's order does not apply to religious gatherings. I'm pretty sure that viruses are functionally atheists, however. Religious gatherings in South Korea were one of the biggest transmission vectors and the hardest to get under control.

Today I am adding a couple of new columns to show the linear and quadratic model predictions for each state. This will help show which states are breaking their trend lines, and hopefully help identify new trends and improvements. Today, Georgia, Texas, Maryland, and Rhode Island are the outlier performers, coming high on both the linear and quadratic models. Montana and Wyoming has shocking reversals in their active cases, seeing significant drops. Maybe the sparse, rural nature of these states enforces a de facto social distancing. It's also possible that their testing is uneven and we will see an equal jump in cases tomorrow.

One thing that I am noticing is that the regular weekly variation is affecting the growth models. This is enough to make linear models seem accurate for early in the week, while quadratic models are better later in the week. In looking into this phenomenon with more long-term models and regularization of the variation over the week, it seems that the weak quadratic model is a better overall fit for many of the states right now. This is interesting, since it would be more consistent with Kiskowski and Chowell's local saturation model. More data over the next few days will help validate or refute some of my suspicions.