There are well funded, very smart academics in many centers who are doing sophisticated future modeling of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US, and how it is likely to grow and morph over the next 6 months to a year. They are critical to our future preparedness.
But we also need early, crude, rough approximations of certain critical variables. There is an ancient and honorable tradition of back of the envelope and shoe leather calculations. I was honored to be mentored by one of the very best American epidemiologists who started his career when data runs were made with steel rods on punch cards in literal shoeboxes, J. William Lloyd, Ph.D. He was the soul of compassion and expertise, and I miss him greatly.
He taught me to use what you have, always work to get the best data, but ever wait until the perfect data set magically appears in a public health crisis. Like now, for instance.
There are finally enough US cases to glimpse what the future may hold for pandemic spread in the US.
Here is a rough first cut at a significant variable based on two weeks of data, diligently updated by excellent people at Johns Hopkins CSSE Global Covid-19 multiple times each day. They are to be commended and praised often. They deserve kudos and large continuing grants to support their work. I would be glad to provide them financial support were I able. That job is left to philanthropists who have the means and scientific sense. Mike Bloomberg (fabulous benefactor of Hopkins), Bill Gates, Warren Buffet?
These basic data sets should be freely available from our nation’s federal public health agencies, but they are massively behind and failing their public duty secondary to top down interference and bureaucratic incapacitation.
This rather simple chart can be updated daily with the publicly available JHU tracking totals by country. We will focus mainly on the American experience here, with some side comparisons to gauge how badly the testing cock-up in America until this point has skewed and undercounted our rapidly growing public health problem.
What Does the Current Chart Suggest
Growth is rapid. Doubling times for reported case are on average about 2.5 days. This means the case burden will quadruple (increase four fold per week.