kalm wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 9:30 am
Good evening, I took a few hours away from everything this evening to just chillax, so I was late in posting this up but here are today's numbers.
First the UK, the Power of Social Distancing is kicking in hard core.
The US IMHE Model is still predicting some pretty cataclysmic stuff for the UK but it is trending down fast for the situation to be closer to a Lite version of a New York style cataclysm, versus one that was headed for 5X worse than New York. Here are some comparative numbers to show just how powerful and how fast & effective social distancing and stay at home orders are once they are at full power. In the UK the Peak Hospital usage date has moved up to 2 days to 4/15/20, the Hospital Bed Shortage has been cut from 85,000 beds to 46,000 beds, the ICU Bed Shortage has been cut from 24,000 to 7,400 and the ventilator shortage has been cut from 21,000 to 12,600. Additionally the projected cumulative death count through July 2020 has been cut from 66,000 to 37,500. This is a HUGE Improvement and show the power of the mitigation measures being used. My expectation is that we will see additional massive improvements over the next few days. The trends are suggesting the UK can potentially handle this in a very ugly and painful manner while still maintaining its NHS, just barely. Hopefully it will be even better. This just shows a stoic truth about the British, when they resolve to do so something with a war time effort and mobilization they do it forcefully and completely, they, of all of the western countries, have not forgot the painful lessons of world war and what it takes to win and appear to be fully engaged in winning this war now.
Now for Sweden. Things have not gotten better, they have gotten worse, far worse. The projected Peak has pushed out seven days to 5/3/2020 and its not because the curve is flattening. The projected Deficit in Hospital Beds has increased massively to 12,700 from 2,900, the projected deficit in ICU beds has shot up from 1,090 to 3,300 (Remember Sweden only has 80 ICU Beds) and the ventilator deficit has increased from 994 to just under 3,000. Additionally the projected deaths through July 2020 has skyrocketed from 4,000 to 13,250. The only good news in this is they still have a little time for social distancing to potentially blunt this, but this is looking bad, very bad. Unlike the Brits, I'm not sure what the Sweeds are doing at this point. This is the first time in over a month where Ive see the UW IMHE Projection Model accelerate after a location is in the mature portion of the infection wave of the the disease curve. About a month ago, this would happen early on in the United States when a location would refuse to social distance, but once they did, the projection started to decisively go the other way at an accelerating rate as time took hold. Again, what is happening in Sweden is decidedly NOT good. This should also be a cautionary tale for everyone in the US who wants to relax stay at home orders right now.
2) What is the Epicenter of this Pandemic? In the United States both the Media and the National Political Leadership both keep pushing the narrative that the Epicenter of the pandemic is someplace other that where it is. Fortunately in the last 48 hours the media is starting to see the error in its reporting, for whatever reason, and are starting to get closer to reporting the true Epicenter of this Pandemic - EUROPE. While the Scientist are fairly sure the evidence supports the theory that COVID-19 Started in Bats, transited to Pangolins and then transited to Human in Wuhan, China. From there there two primary expansive shots of infection from China to the rest of the world, the first a shot to Europe and the second a shot to North America. The North American Shot landed in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver. It infected all of those areas and there surrounding areas but while the virus did travel outward from there, relatively speaking that travel was not very much. Now in Europe, when the disease landed there cooked off quickly, seeding the entire continent and then seeded pretty much rest of the entire world (there are a huge number of societal reason that caused this but way beyond this discussion). From the genetic sequencing of the DNA of the viral outbreak, don by amazing scientists at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, who are the global experts on this issue, they have shown that Europe was the key global distribution hub, so to speak, for COVID-19. The Bat in Wuhan may have been the Manufacturer and did some one off sales in East Asia (Taiwan, Japan, North Korea) and North America (Seattle, LA, SF and Denver), but that bat through it sales agents, the Pangolins and select humans, sold shipped it to its distributors in Europe, which acted like a global Amazon Prime Distribution Center and effectively using 1 hour, 2 hour, next day and 2 day delivery mechanisms over a 21 to 28 day period distributed the virus to the entire globe. An Epicenter is the central point of something, typically a difficult or unpleasant situation. 8 of the top 10 most infected places in the globe are in Europe, which is an indicator of its first to be saturated, only the US which is only #7 and Israel is #10. Europe is also the first across the board to achieve containment and down-slope on the first curve, which gives another data point of its leading status, and the truth is that pretty much everywhere in the world, except the North American West Coast and a few places in East Asia were seeded by virus strain from Europe. While Wuhan may be the beginning, it was clearly not the center of of distribution that was Europe. Europe was the Typhoid Mary in this case not China.
3) Summary Commentary on the various curves ~ for the most part all of the trends of the last few days, across the board, continued on their previous trend lines, with some unknowns for a number of jurisdictions who did not report. Those who did not report, probably did not, due to a combination of it being Sunday and Easter Holiday. Sunday is always kind of a wonky numbers day and many places don't report on Sundays. That being said there were a couple of very noticeable upticks that need to be watched in the United States: Massachusetts & Boston and the City of Chicago, all had significant upticks reversals in relation to trend, is it a one day noisy blip which happens or a signal of something else?