Question: So I was confused with this… “Cuomo said it was encouraging that hospitalizations were projected to double every 4.7 days on Tuesday, compared with Monday, when the number was doubling every 3.4 days, and Sunday, when the figure was every two days.” Not only is it rather early to see impact on hospitalization (as you said!), but also the numbers/measure themselves are unclear. Do you know the source?
Answer: I have also been confused by these pronouncements! I reached out to NY Department of Health yesterday to inquire about the data and see if we could access the data, but I haven’t heard back yet. In the meantime, I looked at the data from The COVID Tracking Project, which is an amazing set of state-level and national data on daily tests conducted, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. It’s just what I wanted! There are some data quality issues, but I’ll work with what I’ve got! And here’s what I’ve got (see line chart).
Overly simplistically — Here, the change from Saturday to Sunday was +371, which is about 1/4 of Sunday’s total, meaning it would take about 4 days for the number of hospitalizations to double. But then between Sunday and Monday, the change was +661, which is about 40% of Saturday’s total, which would mean that hospitalizations would double within 2-3 days. Indeed, by Tuesday, hospitalizations had doubled since Saturday. But the hospitalization increase between Monday and Tuesday was smaller than Sunday to Monday and a smaller proportion of the overall daily hospitalizations (+599), which would mean that doubling time would be slower — hospitalizations would double in about 5 days. So, the Governor saw this as a positive. Now, my overly simplistic numbers are not those the Governor is working with, but you get the general idea. The outlook seemed worse on Monday than on Tuesday. Now if we check out hospitalizations from yesterday, it kind of blows the whole statement that things are getting better — that we are slowing the spread — out of the water. Upshot — I caution reading too much into this right now because we have so few data points. In my opinion, it is definitely too early for the Governor to make pronouncements about the impact of social distancing or the like on the trajectory of the epidemic in New York.
Question: What does it mean now that the United States has the most confirmed cases of coronavirus in the world? Is it because we’ve ramped up testing? Because we have a large population? Or because we’ve been ineffective in our response?
Answer: I will give the US credit that in the last week, we really have expanded testing dramatically. Yay! Check out this table I made also thanks to data compiled by The COVID Tracking Project. The expansion is impressive, and the New York Times has a great article today on the topic with way better and far more visualizations than mine. Check it out! Despite the impressive increase in testing, per capita, we’re still quite far behind (we are at just ~200 tests per 100,000 people compared with Italy at ~600 tests per 100,000 and South Korea at ~700 tests per 100,000). And even at our high (so far) of ~100,000 test a day, it’s still only 2/3 the level public health experts recommend — 150,000. Finally, I’d say that our high case count is a reflection of our response, which was too late and is still poorly coordinated among other challenges (described further in Q&A of 3/24). And if you’re interested, Jeffery Sachs wrote an opinion today on this very topic.
