Over the past few weeks most everyone in the country has had to make a few adjustments. We have all been figuring out how to stay sane without meaningful in person social contact. I’m a test-prep teacher and stay-at-home dad sheltering in place with a wife and 2 young kids. I’m not an expert, but I have a ton of experience crunching data. I wanted the most complete picture possible of the current information, so I did it myself. The exercise of updating my spreadsheets every day paradoxically grants me a measure of solace as I am bombarded by depressing headlines. Mostly the solace is procedural, the mindless repetitive task of updating spreadsheets and tweaking formulas is soothing. However, monitoring the data isn’t just a beneficial meditation, it actually paints a strikingly different and more heartening picture of this outbreak than you will find in any headlines.

Before talking about the data let’s address the elephant in the room: the fact that the data is wrong. Anyone who naively accepts any testing data on COVID is days behind based on the nature of the disease, and also subject to whatever distortions the local testing scenario is imposing. This is a legitimate point that is never far from my mind, but I want to be very clear: FLAWED DATA IS NOT THE SAME THING AS NO DATA. Over time it is possible to identify trends that are legitimate as long as the nature of the flaws are held constant. And it is possible to get a bead on whether the flaws are changing by tracking what percentage of cases are coming back positive.

The fact is, after an abysmal start the US has made huge strides and our testing can now be considered adequate, if not downright good. We have tested over a million people and are testing over 100,000 more every day. Most states are seeing fewer than 8% of tests coming back positive, meaning for every 1 positive result, there are 12 negative results. If anything this is understating negative results because the biggest problem we are still having with testing data is a lack of consistent reporting of negative results from private labs in some states. Compare this to a mere 6 days ago when 85% of tests in New Jersey were coming back positive, indicating that we were only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Since then the cases in Jersey have exploded and now 40% of their tests are coming back positive, we aren’t all the way to good data but we are getting there and can track that progress.

The other big problem with test data is the late onset of symptoms. With some people not showing symptoms until nearly two weeks later, testing data lags reality quite a bit. However, we can assume that the characteristics of the disease are not changing significantly on the timeframes we are examining. So in a day to day, week to week examination of the data we will not trust the numbers, but we will trust the trends.

Over the past week there has been an increasing disconnect between the modeled outcomes and the actual data we are seeing around the world. We are hearing terrifying numbers about millions dead and as much as 70–80% of people eventually contracting COVID, but we are seeing country after country peaking their new infections and seeing declines. That just means fewer people catching it each day, not fewer people having it.

There are lots of numbers thrown around to describe the spread of the disease like the R0 value and rates of growth and total infection numbers, but I prefer to use the time it is taking for the cases to double. I prefer the doubling period because it is more intuitively intelligible for more people. Most people get the difference between cases doubling every two days (red: us 2 weeks ago) and cases doubling every 4 (blue: us 2 days ago) or 8 days (Spain now). Everyone might not nail the exact difference in the curve, but we all know it’s a pretty big deal. (We are at every 5 days now)

I generally calculate this doubling over a 3 day period to avoid misreading daily fluctuations as significant, but still be fairly responsive to recent changes.

Last Wednesday I used these metrics to put together an extremely rough projection of future case growth in the US for a friend. I went through all 50 states and looked at the doubling period trends and the quality of testing in that state. I took that and compared it to where China and Italy were on their curves at the point they had a similar doubling period and used that to estimate where each state would end up and when their new cases would peak. I was disturbed by my low results, and the early peak. I went back over everything and tried to find a way to get higher results, but found I couldn’t without assuming the disease behaved fundamentally differently here than in every other country COVID had blown up.

Based on my rough numbers it looked like the new cases would peak somewhere between the 1st and the 4th of April. It felt insane at the time. It felt like for every place that slowed down like Washington or California there was at least one other Louisiana or New Jersey that was accelerating. Over the past five days that changed. We have only seen a 40% increase in new cases. That works out to doubling every 9 or 10 days.

We are not seeing declines, but we are darn near a peak. We are seeing slowing infections across the country, and around the world. In fact, across Europe, most countries have already peaked and are seeing declines in new cases.

Clearly there are countries that are handling COVID far better than the US. The ship sailed long ago on us following the path of South Korea or Singapore or Japan or even China. The European countries are another matter entirely. They haven’t been able to match the prodigious testing of South Korea, or the contact tracing of China, but they are still seeing declining new cases. I am not in any way defending the response we have seen to COVID in the US as good or even adequate. I am just saying that even with major missteps and ongoing dysfunction we are still seeing the situation improve dramatically.

Over the past five days we have seen our doubling period improve from every 3.1 days to every 4.9 days. We are probably within a few days of seeing declines in new cases like almost every other major outbreak has already seen. If Italy continues to decline they might see less than 0.25% of their population catch COVID. A whole lot worse than the 0.0058% that caught it in China, but worlds better than the story you hear on the news about flattening the curve so 70% of people catch it over a longer period.

The reasons the models are projecting such high rates of infection and deaths are myriad and complex and deserve a whole separate article, but some modelers are starting to come around to the fact that we will not be overwhelmed by this outbreak. Specifically Neil Ferguson with the Imperial College of London, one of the top epidemiologists in the world, told parliament that he did not expect the UK’s hospital system to be overwhelmed and for there to be significantly fewer than 20,000 deaths in the UK. This is the person who the 2.2 million dead in the US number came from. That was always a misrepresentation of his work by the press, but he has shifted his estimates dramatically downward in light of the sharp drop off in new cases in Italy.

Globally new cases have only increased by 20% over the last five days.

Again we are not quite seeing consistent declines, but 20% over 5 days is on pace to double every 18 days, so we are getting close to the peak.

I want everyone to know that this will not go on forever. It will not necessarily kill one of your loved ones. We are all making sacrifices, and it is not just to spare the hospital system. We are reducing the overall number of people that will be infected. So when you see some absurdity like holding COVID chicken pox parties because we are all going to get it anyway, know that for what it is: a vile piece of absurdity predicated upon a false assumption.

We have to keep doing what we are doing. Keeping to ourselves, creatively conquering cabin fever and loneliness. Keep being responsible, take care of your family, and know that it is working. Once we minimize new infections, we will be able to put systems in place to facilitate a return to some semblance of normal life.

In the meantime if any of you would like to keep up with what is happening in your state or around the world, I have the state data here and the international data here. If you need reassurance that this wave will eventually crest I have a list of countries by the date they peak here. I will keep updating every day and computing the doubling periods. Of course, new cases peaking is only the first milestone to defeating this pandemic. We want to get to active cases peaking, and then to total eradication, but let’s take it one step at a time.