Skip to main content

New story in Health from Time: The U.S. Has Officially Unflattened the Curve With Its Worst Day of the Coronavirus Pandemic Yet



On April 7, less than a month after reported cases of COVID-19 began to rise in the United States, the rate of new infections reached a peak: an average of 31,630 new cases per day, meaning close to 10 in every 100,000 Americans were testing positive daily. For months, that figure stood as the worst day in the pandemic’s spread at the national level.

Until now. The latest data show that, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week (June 23 and June 24), the U.S. surpassed that high-water mark, at more than 31,700 infections per day. The state of the pandemic in this country is officially worse than it has ever been.

What is particularly troubling about this trend is that the country as a whole was on the right track through the end of May (unlike a number of states, such as North Carolina, which never flattened or showed extended signs of progress) even if it wasn’t out of the woods entirely. The fact that those positive signs all flipped in polarity suggest that, whatever combination of factors led to this resurgence, one thing is clear: the nation did not adapt to changing circumstances.

Assigning causes and effects to peaks and valleys in a dataset as complex as this one is a dangerous business. But as my colleague Tara Law and I reported last week, greater availability of testing is very unlikely to explain the surge in cases. And one cannot ignore the fact that many states began cautiously reopening public spaces around Memorial Day, about two weeks before the numbers in the U.S. took off. That’s about COVID-19’s typical incubation time.

The virus has also struck the country asymmetrically, moving from dense urban centers to less populated regions, which requires a nimble shift in public interventions to combat.

Crunching the Numbers

One might reasonably ask why we didn’t notice this yesterday, since the peak value came two days ago. The answer involves just a smidgeon of math. We’ll get through it together.

Every evening, a team at Johns Hopkins University publishes daily figures on the number of COVID-19 cases (and resultant fatalities) on a worldwide, national, U.S. state and U.S. county level. As you can see from the gray bars in the above chart, these figures, when graphed day-by-day (as opposed to cumulatively), can fluctuate a lot, for apparently arbitrary reasons. Figures tend to be higher on Fridays than earlier in the week, for example, which can easily make the trend hard to read on any given day if you don’t have weeks of data to help put it in context.

What most publications (including TIME) have done is report the data in a seven-day rolling average, which smooths the curve in order to essentially imbue the chart with that context.

We’re using what’s called a “centered” moving average, where each daily value shows the average of that day as well as the previous three days and the following three days. There’s one significant downside to this approach: the most recent few days don’t have seven data points to sample from, because, like you, we can’t see into the future. For those days, this method uses an average of the previous three days, the current day, and however many days follow (two, one, or none).

But that’s a worthy trade-off for the fact that a centered average tracks much more closely with the raw data, showing a more accurate picture overall. That much is made clear from this comparison of the same data as above with an average of the previous week (blue), an average of the following week (green), and the centered average that TIME uses (red):

This may seem pedantic, but it gets to the heart of how tricky it can be to accurately report the magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis. Based on only the unaveraged daily values, the two worst days still lie in April, and that may be true for some time. And while as of today the centered average peaks on June 23, when we checked yesterday, with one fewer data point, June 23 was still a shade below the previous peak. Within a few days, we’ll be able to say for certain how much worse off we are now than we were when things previously looked the most bleak.

Popular posts from this blog

New story in Health from Time: 3 More People Diagnosed With Coronavirus in Northern California

Three more people in Northern California have been diagnosed with the coronavirus known as 2019-nCoV, health officials in the area said Sunday, doubling the number of cases in the state and bringing the total across the country to 11 . The patients, whose symptoms are not yet serious enough to warrant hospitalization, are being kept in their homes, where they are being closely monitored, the San Francisco Chronicle reports . Two of the patients are a husband and wife from San Benito County. The husband fell ill after he returned home from Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. It is believed he transferred the virus to his wife, who had not been to China. The other patient became sick while visiting family in Santa Clara County. She also previously visited Wuhan. Since arriving in the United States on Jan. 23, she has only left her home twice to seek out medical assistance. Officials from both counties said they are working to identify anyone who may have come into cont...

New video by blogilates on YouTube

Day 8 - 14 | Blogilates 2020 Challenge You guys are CRUSHING the #2020Challenge so far! Idk about you but my abs are soooooore! This week, we're doing 20 reps of abs every day + 20 reps of another new exercise every day! If you need a little extra motivation, text my number (510-692-4556) and tell me all about it so we can come up with a solution together! This link also works: https://ift.tt/2Qjqw7G This week's moves are: Jan. 8th (starts 0:48) - 20 butterfly bridges + 20 criss cross (butt + abs) Jan. 9th (starts 2:43) - 20 oil riggers + 20 rollovers (arms + abs) Jan. 10th (starts 8:29) - 20 lunges + 20 leg outs (legs + abs) Jan. 11th (starts 11:03) - 20 walnut crushers + 20 single leg drops (back + abs) Jan. 12th (starts 13:41) - 20 sprinters + 20 crunches (obliques + abs) Jan. 13th (starts 16:27) - 20 squat jumps + 20 russian twists (cardio + abs) Jan. 14th (starts 18:57) - 20 plank jacks + 20 butt ups (total body + abs) Here is where I get all of my music! Epidemic Sound: ...

New story in Health from Time: Coronavirus Cases Outside China Are Accelerating Rapidly. Here’s What to Know

A surge in deadly coronavirus cases outside China is raising concerns that the outbreak has reached a new stage and could continue its global spread to even more vulnerable countries. In the central Chinese province of Hubei, where the virus is believed to have originated, the number of cases appears to be stabilizing, according to government figures. But the number of people infected elsewhere in the world is rising quickly, with clusters in South Korea , Italy, Iran and a cruise ship docked in Japan. As of Monday, more than 2,200 cases of the virus, officially called COVID-19, have been reported outside of mainland China, where the overwhelming majority of the 79,000 cases have been located since officials first discovered the disease in December. The number of deaths outside China has also increased to 166, including 50 in Iran and four in Italy. In a news conference Monday, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the WHO...