There Are Some Very Positive Signs Lately.

A lot has gone on in the past few days and it looks pretty promising.


The Light At the End Of the Tunnel
First off, lets look at the US curve of daily new COVID cases and tests:

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I averaged these over three days because I've noticed testing drops off over Sundays and surges on Monday.   The blue bars are the number of new cases we were getting a day. You can see that we stopped growing in the tests per day about a week ago.  We're still adding about 30,000 cases a day, but the number per day used to be going up pretty rapidly.  The prior week we increased almost 50% from 17K a day to 26K a day.  Our testing rate has also leveled off at around 140K tests a day.

I also included the % positive tests as a yellow line (with the scale to the right). The % of positive tests had gone up for some time, but now its trending down (the big dip comes from a spike in testing, but the downward trend for the week looks obvious). So it appears that we've gotten pretty close to measuring the actual number of cases because when the test rate spiked, the % positive rate dropped.  This has been something I've been watching for for a couple weeks and it's a very positive development.  We are still adding tens of thousands of cases a day, but the first sign that we're reaching the end is when the growth rate slows or stops.

A Test Rate Oddity.
On a side note, it was surprising that the % positive tests would be going up as we rapidly increased testing.  You would think it would go down because you would prioritize your testing of the most likely candidates so if you tested twice as many people, you'd expect more of them to come back negative. If the % positive stayed the same while rapidly increasing testing, it would be a clear sign that we had many more cases than we'd identified. That it would go up was truly surprising. So what would make it go up? While I don't have the data to be sure of this, I think it means that while we grew our testing at a fast rate over the last few weeks, we also got much smarter about where we applied our tests, sending more to hot spots instead of spreading it equally over the country. You can see a hint of this in my graph of persons tested across a range of states:

Until March 21st, North Carolina had almost exactly the % of US tests as the % of our population.  As its become clearer that we're doing much better than other states our size, our rate of testing has gone down compared to others.  If this is on purpose, then credit is due to whoever is managing our test allocations.

How Has Social Distance Affected the Flu?

While we are new at testing people for COVID, we've been tracking the flu for many years.  Take a look at last year's flu curve compared to this year's:

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The yellow and green bars are two different strains of flu. This year's flu peak was much larger than last year's, but you can see how it sharply fell off in mid March when COVID awareness kicked in when last year (and normally) it's still at its peak until mid April.  At a minimum, this shows that we saved many lives by cutting short the flu's cycle.  To the degree you believe COVID spreads similarly to the flu, it also gives a view of how new cases may have been falling sharply in the past few weeks (even if our testing is only now getting to the point where we can perceive it).

Easter Invitation
One last note:  If COVID has gotten in the way of your Easter Plans, I would like you to join me (virtually) for Easter Service at my home church, The Summit. You can find more about when and where to attend our services here: