COVID-19: Another step in the right direction

UPDATE: Monitoring the flattening of the contagion curve

These past few days, I have been monitoring the evolution of the number of confirmed COVID-19-related cases in the US. In the first article, I wrote about potential different scenarios and a model we could use to monitor when the contagion curve began flattening.

Yesterday, I wrote a quick update showing early indications that the curve could be flattening.

One more day of data, confirmed cases as of 3/30, seems to show a similar trend, deceleration of contagion. See the green circle where the blue line (confirmed cases) is not following the grey one (exponential growth).

What gives me even more hope is that the percent change of daily confirmed cases is the smallest since social isolation begun, around Friday 3/20. It was, yesterday, 15%.

What we still need to see is the trend breaking the 10% floor, to then hopefully grow closer to 0% and of course our collective goal, negative growth, meaning people are healing faster than new contagions take place.

Such hope could materialize by the end of April as suggested by the highly hopeful model, or it could remain at around 10% daily growth.

Of course a it is possible that we see new outbreaks and daily growth goes back to 20–33% ranges, which means exponential growth.