18. Weekly Update: Watch Out California

(5/21/20) We are going to change emphasis and focus on the U.S. and CA in particular in this update. The Northeast hotspots are recovering well, but other outbreaks are developing across the country and CA may be on the cusp of a huge outbreak.

We are going to dispense with our customary international and U.S. death rate plots to focus on key U.S. states. This is an extension of my recent post (5/19/20 – Daily Rumblings – CA the Next Hotspot), which you should read.

But first let me proudly say that my manuscript describing this model and its attributes has been published on the on-line site MedRxiv and can be found at:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.16.20104430v1

You can preview or download a pdf of the full paper.

I may also start reducing the frequency of updates as these take time and I don’t have a lot of it. Further my model is now being closely replicated by the renowned UW IHME model that I have compared to (see below). My mission to provide state-of-the-art forecasts and to debunk the misleading data that proliferated (and still does) during the early days of this pandemic is less of a concern now.

So, below are death rate plots for the U.S., NY, and CA to show a range of different behavior most likely due to differing levels of diligence in practicing social distancing.

New York was the deadliest place in the world due to Covid-19 and still has a high prevalence (active cases) but it is receding fast. CA is at a much lower level (about 6x lower by per capita), but deaths and hospitalizations are stubbornly flat and not receding (see Daily Rumblings 5/19/20 discussing LA and OC). In fact, CA looks to be going through a death rebound. Very sad; may downgrade it to red again. We forecast the 6x greater prevalence per capita for NY vs. CA (down from 20x three weeks ago) to fall below that in CA in about 3 weeks and this will make NY safer to ease social restrictions sooner than CA (though of course this has already started).

We now show our familiar table for forecasted total deaths, prevalence (current cases), and incidence (new cases) along with their values per capita (per million people) as well as dates we consider to be the earliest to begin a graduate easing of social distancing. We reiterate again that our model does not anticipate future changed behavior such as social relaxing, but rather past behavior, so we expect to see some upward movements that could be quite severe for certain populations.  We will be developing a revision to the model to explore various scenarios for relaxation of social restrictions.

Key observations include:

• The U.S. trails the rest of the world: There just isn’t much else to say here. There are pockets of improvement particularly in the Northeast, but the rest of the country just doesn’t get it and there is just no leadership to follow. Wearing masks actually does help in many situations, but it also stands as a symbol of solidarity. Most of Americans get that, but the one person who needs to, doesn’t. OK zip it Jack!
• NY and NJ: NY as stated above and last week is doing very well so far. NJ, which was showing good progress seems to be hitting a little plateau, which might reflect some regional outbreaks. We hope they can get that under control before the whole state goes to social easing. This is really like wild fires and you have to catch the small brush fires before they explode.
• Social easing: I no longer pretend that we should wait as long as the ease dates in the above Table recommend, although that would keep the death rates down. I’ve said it before; we need to socially ease, but we have to be very smart about it and practice good hygiene and behavior. If we do these four things, we should be fine: keep distance where possible, wear a mask when close to people, don’t shake hands or hug, and wash hands and surfaces frequently.

I haven’t presented my favorite log-log plot of death rate vs. cumulative deaths in a while, but it is very informative in showing when recovery begins and also revealing when the recovery is floundering, as you can see below (see Figure caption). The European countries, except Sweden are recovering nicely. The U.S. is showing slow recovery and CA is relapsing badly.

Now for our comparison of forecasted total deaths to the venerable benchmark model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington (UW) (http://www.healthdata.org/covid/).

We’ve talked about these two models before. The IHME model to our knowledge has not yet been published to see what is under the hood. We of course have laid it out in our MedRxiv paper. However, two things are clear: (1) our models are similar as evidenced by the similar forecasts, (2) Whereas we already anticipated asymmetric recovery and built that into our models, they apparently did not and we see evidence of a scrambling to modify their models to account for this. This evidence is that they consistently underestimated total deaths relative to us, but now are almost totally overestimating, which may be right, but feels like tilting the pinball machine. Our forecasts, as measured statistically, still remains more stable regarding volatility (see Plot below) without any apparent penalty in forecasting accuracy (and precision).