Coronavirus Growth in Western Countries: March 27 Update

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Friday. Nothing much has changed since yesterday. Italy had a bad day, but that made up for a couple of good days and they’re still on roughly the same trendline: peaking in early April and going to zero in early June.

So let’s take a closer look at the United States. It appears to be well below the Italian trendline, which is good news if true. Unfortunately, that’s hard to confirm since the US curve depends a lot on the formula that sets Day 0—and it’s possible that the formula doesn’t scale properly for a country as big as ours. If that’s true, the correct choice of Day 0 might produce a curve that’s right on the Italian trendline, not below it.

So let’s take a look at something else that shows a little more detail. The chart below displays the total death toll for the US on a log scale. I don’t use a log scale for the main set of charts because it’s confusing for anyone who isn’t fairly proficient in math. However, it’s not hard to understand: as you can see, the y-axis is done in powers of ten, which means that every increase from one line to the next indicates that the number of deaths has been multiplied by ten. The handy thing about this is that exponential curves end up looking like straight lines:

So far, the US death toll is a very precise straight line, which means it’s growing exponentially. If it continues on this path, we’ll hit 2,500 deaths by the end of the week; 11,000 by the end of next week, etc. The big question, therefore, is: how long will it continue on this path? There’s really no way to know for sure, but it’s a good sign when the line starts to flatten out. That hasn’t happened yet. In fact, the line is actually accelerating a bit, though that’s hard to see by eyeballing it.

With no way of predicting the peak based on the US trendline, my best guess is that we’re on the Italian path but two or three weeks behind. I figure they’ll peak in early April, which means we’ll peak in mid-April. Maybe. Needless to say, this depends on our control measures starting to have an effect, which ought to begin this week or next, and it also depends on our control measures being as good as Italy’s and being kept in place for at least a couple of months. For what it’s worth, though, this is close to a new prediction from a team at the University of Washington, which projects a peak in the second week of April and a death toll of 80,000 through June. It would be great if we kept the death toll so low, but unfortunately this projection assumes that every state adopts a total lockdown by next week and keeps it in place through June. I doubt that will happen, which is why I’m more pessimistic than they are.

Here’s how to read the charts: Let’s use France as an example. For them, Day 0 was March 5, when they surpassed one death per 10 million by recording their sixth death. They are currently at Day 22; total deaths are at 332x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 29.8 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is slightly below where Italy was on their Day 22.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate