Some more big numbers from the Monterey County Department of public Health in the last few days. Here’s what the case history looks like as of this morning’s DPH report.
The vertical axis is the number of cases reported per day. The raw daily numbers are the blue diamonds. The orange line is the seven day weighted average of the blue points. The dotted orange line is a least-squares fit to the blue points. You can see that, about a month ago, the daily cases started to climb rapidly. Are we entering a period of exponential growth? One way to get a handle on that is to look at the percent increase in the cumulative number of cases.
Again, I’ve plotted a 7-day moving average in orange. A negative slope of that line indicates slower than exponential growth. A positive slope indicates faster than exponential growth. Zero slope, or constant percent growth over time, indicates exponential growth, and it look like we’ve had that for the last couple of weeks.
Another way to look at the same data is to plot the number of days for the cumulative case number to double, given exponential growth.
For the past couple of weeks, the doubling time has been a bit over two weeks, which is pretty scary.
It’s not because of increased testing.
In the last two weeks, the number of test performed has dropped.
Turning to the state as a whole, the daily increase in case load continues its gradual rise.
Although deaths are falling slowly.
This is probably a combination of better treatment and undercounting of cases in the early weeks.
Hospitalizations remain more or less constant.
Testing has been gradually increasing. In the last few days, we have finally gotten the 7-day moving average of daily tests performed over 60,000, which has been the objective for the last month or so.
The positivity rate has fallen, and has held steady for the past month or so:
We are getting better about keeping patients out of the hospitals:
The California numbers indicate to me that the virus continues its penetration into the population, and that the “waves” that the press is do fond of talking about are largely mythical, when the state is taken as a whole. The hospitals appear to have adequate capacity at present, and we have gotten better at managing the disease outside of hospital settings, but the rise in the caseload threatens that situation.
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