Morning Update for Friday March 27th

This has been quite a week.  While the growth in cases in the US is sobering, here are some things to consider:

First, last Saturday, I explained how our rise in cases is connected to our rise in testing.  Here is today's common timeline on new cases:

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And Look at the Number of New Tests Done

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As I wrote about last Saturday,  most of the growth we're seeing is from the rapid increase in testing we're doing.  Just look at the increase in daily tests we've had.

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We've gone from testing underachievers to doing several times more tests than any other country in the course of 10 days, completing 100K tests just yesterday!

Another thing to look at is our number of cases relative to population:

While we're still climbing, when you consider how much larger we are than most of the other countries with high rates of infections, we're just in the middle of the pack.

About 4 out of 5 COVID cases are considered mild -- some coughing, some fever, but nothing that would put someone in the hospital.  Perhaps many of the incremental cases we're finding from more testing are these mild cases.  One way to test that idea is to look at the number of fatalities in different countries:

Note that this graph isn't adjusted for population, its just number of cases.  While our case rate is going up, and every COVID death is tragic,  this graph is in stark contrast to the first one showing case growth.

Finally, I want to show you one other interesting graph.  In this one, I'm looking at the rate of positive tests as a % of daily tests.

 If you look at South Korea, who now looks like they really did an incredible job of containing COVID,  by now, their positive rate was relatively flat. If the do the same number of tests per day, you would expect the % of positives to go down as the number of cases go down.

Our cases dropped for a bit, before we started really increasing the test rate, but now its climbing. We went from 6000 cases a day to 100,000 cases a day from the 14th to today, you would expect the number of positives to go way down as we got outside the critical cases at the hospitals and out to more people who just suspect they have it, but instead it's gone up. I can think of two explanations (and if you have others, please comment).  The first is that the number of cases we have is increasing even faster than our test rate.  If so, that would line up with some of the more dire predictions of what's in store for us.  The second is that we've gotten smarter about who we test.  Early on when testing was in very short supply, its possible we didn't send nearly enough tests to hot spots like New York and Washington State because it would mean not sending many at all to places like North Carolina.  We also have some great tech minds using the systems that get so many people to click on ads now using those systems to pick the right people to test.  I hope it's the second case.

At 100,000 tests per day, we're also now in a position to randomly test people in different communities to get a sense of what the real infection rate is and where COVID is most concentrated.

One thought to take into the weekend -- last month, most of our brightest tech minds were spending the day trying to figure out how to get you to click ads. Now their trying to see the path of an invisible virus.  Some of our brightest medical minds were working on drugs and devices that wouldn't see the market for 10 years. Now they're getting stuff done in weeks. I've always felt the US is a magnet for people who want to get things done.  I think we're beginning to see what we're capable of in a crisis like this, and I think the rest of the world -- particularly countries just beginning to be affected by COVID -- will be grateful we were part of this pandemic because of the mass of innovations they will benefit from.