COVID-19 Daily Update for Yesterday, Wednesday, 8/19/2020:
Yesterday's update was a "model talk" discussion about problems with rt.live's approach to estimating Rt.
Today is a more traditional status update.
Today is a more traditional status update.
World Wide Trends in Brief:
World wide we are starting to see minor signs of improvement.
Daily cases peaked at the end of July, and have been falling VERY slowly since then. Because recoveries lag, they have continued to climb over the same period:
However, the number of new infections is still larger than the number of new recoveries, which means that the change in the number of active cases is still positive, meaning that more people are sick today than yesterday. But that trend has been moving down over time:
For the world to recover, this trend needs to be negative, and then stay negative. But there are still signs of improvement.
We can also see improvement in the daily deaths, which have also been trending down since the end of July:
Can it be Done, Watching China, New Zealand, and South Korea:
We have been especially watching three countries: China, South Korea, and New Zealand to see if their strategies for dealing with the virus is viable. China used a totalitarian lockdown, South Korea used extensive contact tracing with only minor restrictions, and New Zealand "went hard and went early" (without China's totalitarian bent) to stamp out all local transmission before reopening completely.
All three were initially successful. All three are now facing local outbreaks that are challenging their strategies. If we wanted to prove to the rest of the world that there were alternatives to our failed approaches, these are some important places to watch.
China's approach of local lockdowns of the affected regions appears to be working:
New Zealand's second lockdown with contact tracing also now appears to be producing improvements:
South Korea is still struggling to get its most recent Fundamentalist Church Based outbreak back under control. But they did it once. Now we need to see if they can do it again. It's currently too soon to tell:
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