A day doesn’t go by without hearing someone talking about COVID-19. And with the 5-day moving average of the daily growth rate for confirmed cases hovering at 11% (16% excluding China), it’s hard not to see frightening numbers of new cases. On March 24, the global daily growth rate sat at 13%, excluding China (it’s a better growth rate to look at since China has flattened out and it bears significant weight on the average).
We will be adding 100,000 new cases every 1-2 days from now on
Because of the sheer size of cases we are at now (460,000 cases the last time I looked), and a growth rate in the low teens, this will easily add 100K cases every few days, as illustrated here:
Here is a history of the daily growth rate, with and without China:
As more cases happen outside of China (now 80% of all confirmed cases are outside of China), this lifts the Global Growth rate closer to the growth rate outside of China. One is “growing” and one is “shrinking”. These numbers will converge quite soon. I believe you should be excluding China when looking at daily growth rates since China is allegedly not adding any significant new cases. I looked at growth rates both ways when providing my prediction on 1M cases by April 2nd.
Note: Ignore the blip around March 12-14. This is caused by John Hopkin’s data set having 3/12/2020 data similar to that of 3/11/2020. Occasionally, these data sets won’t be updated on a given day; but the overall trend is good. For this reason, I tend to prefer moving averages to smooth this out.
To help you see the number of cases inside and outside of China to understand the impacts on global growth rates, please reference the chart below.
The good news is that overall, the daily growth rate is declining which means we appear to be heading in the right direction. However, we will have pockets of growth (like New York) and others that will provide plenty of sensational journalism to write about.
I wanted to thank the team at John Hopkins for providing raw data to allow many news outlets and individuals like myself to analyze the data in any way we see fit.
Thanks,
Ryan
I have been around IT since I was in high school (running a customized BBS, and hacking) and am not the typical person that finds one area of interest at work; I have designed databases, automated IT processes, written code at the driver level and all the way up to the GUI level, ran an international software engineering team, started an e-commerce business that generated over $1M, ran a $5B product marketing team for one of the largest semiconductor players in the world, traveled as a sales engineer for the largest storage OEM in the world, researched and developed strategy for one of the top 5 enterprise storage providers, and traveled around the world helping various companies make investment decisions in startups. I also am extremely passionate about uncovering insights from any data set. I just like to have fun by making a notable difference, influencing others, and to work with smart people.