Disclaimer
I'm still not qualified to talk about medicine or even statistics, or the reliability of the statistics coming out of the WHO, China, or other world media. Those are complicated questions that I'm not the person to answer. However, what I can do is graph those statistics.
Today
The main thing I'm watching currently is the rapid rise in cases outside of China. The situation in China continues to be stable -- as far as reported numbers go. The biggest news in cases outside China at the moment seems to be in South Korea, Iran, and Italy. South Korea has gone from about 50 cases to 600 in four days. In the same four days, Iran has reported 43 infections and 8 deaths -- more deaths than any country outside China. Given how the ratio of deaths to infections is much lower globally, this probably means large numbers of cases are still unreported in Iran. And finally, Italy has gone from about three to about 165 cases in the same four days, with something like a dozen towns in northern Italy now under quarantine.
The Graphs
Figure 1. The number of cases outside China continues its steep climb, more than doubling in the past week.
Figure 2. This is the same as Figure 1, but on a log graph. On this sort of graph steady exponential growth is converted to steady linear growth. If the growth in cases begins to fall below an exponential path, it may be visible more quickly on a graph like this than in Figure 2, just because the human eye is better at judging the straightness of lines than the exponentialness of curves. So far, this graph shows no sign that the virus is leaving its path of doubling in less than a week. We can only hope that speed of growth will slow. Hypothetically, if it were not to slow, the majority of the world would have the virus sometime around July.
Figure 3. At present, the "Confirmed Current Infections" is caught in a recently emerged tug-of-war, as the worsening situation outside China and the improving situation inside China contribute to a relatively flat number of current infections in total.
Figure 4. This is just like Figure 3, but adds in China's count of "suspected" cases. In my highly unqualified opinion graphs based on this method are better summaries of what's actually going on in China than graphs that do not count "suspected", which suffer from an enormous artificial spike on February 12th.
Figure 5. This is the daily delta in Figure 3. Still no increase in confirmed current infections since about a week ago, but one might say the last three days didn't go quite as well as one might have hoped. Please note that because I've made today's graphs a little earlier in the evening than previous graphs, the last dot does not capture tonight's numbers from China.
Figure 6. This is the daily delta for Figure 4. Like Figure 5, it suffers from not having today's China data in yet. But we'll know more tomorrow.
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