COVID-19 Daily Update for Yesterday, Friday, 8/28/2020

World Wide Trends, Updated Methodology:

I have been using WorldOMeter to get world wide recovery data. They had the best estimates, because many places simply don't report recoveries, and in that case, WorldOMeter seemed to be estimating them. 

Sometimes. 

But after staring at this figure for weeks now, I'm coming to the conclusion that they are missing a lot of recoveries. 

It's been over a month since peak cases back in mid July, but the recoveries have not yet caught up. But they should have by now. And if this was wrong, it would be impacting everything I did with global trends... the % growth rate, doubling times, etc.

So just as a sanity check, I implemented a common "recovery estimation" algorithm (used for a while by Texas). That is, I took the number of cases-deaths, and I assumed that 80% of those will have a mild case, and will recover in 14 days, while 20% of those will have a more severe case and recover in 32 days. 

(Note, I am not looking for "long haulers" who seem to have a lingering immune over-reaction that persists and causes sometimes debilitating problems long aver the virus itself has left their system. Rather, I am looking for the number of people who have cleared the virus and are therefore no longer contagious, regardless of long term impacts.) 

As you can see, this approach paints a far more optimistic picture of what is happening. I also think that it is more likely to be correct. 

If we use these estimates of recoveries to estimate the daily change in active cases, we get the following: 

Again we see that my estimates look very different from those of WorldOMeter, and, they paint a much more optimistic picture of what is happening. Right now, my estimate shows that the number of active cases is declining (the change is below 0) while WoM's estimate for recoveries has the number of active infections still growing (above 0).

If we use these new recovery estimates to calculate the % growth (in active cases) this is the result: 

And if we zoom in on the y axis we see that the trend has been a negative % growth for just over a week: 

I highly suspect that right now more people are recovering each day than are being newly infected each day. Which we would not suspect if we just naively used WoM's recovery data.

Some good news.