COVID-19 re-evaluated

I looked at the data again, here is what I see.

1. It now seems clear that the COVID-19 deaths match the cases almost exactly, just with a two week delay.
2. The US has dropped case mortality from 10% at the end of March to 2% at the end of June, which seems to have leveled off at 1.5%, and does not seem likely to move any time soon.
3. Our cases have exploded -- there was a big dip in September, but growing sharply from around October 5th and continuing today.

Conclusions:

1. Since mortality leveled off around July 1st, we can forecast expected deaths for at least the next two weeks quite simply -- here is a graph overlaying average deaths with 1.5% of cases from 14 days earlier.

   
   
   
   
   So you can see, it is pretty certain that we will be breaking 2,000 deaths per day in two weeks. And looking at the curve, it seems almost certain that we will be at 3,000 deaths per day a few weeks after that, where we can *hope* maybe we will level off and start dropping back down. My best guess is that we will have at least 350,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States by the end of 2020.
2. It could be *much* worse. That was my "optimistic" prediction of what will happen, if we all respond to the spread in a meaningful way, and ASAP.  But what if our response is not effective, and COVID-19 infections match the patterns of influenza? Because we do know a lot about that, and it looks real bad. With the flu, the infections really start up around October, keeps going up through year-end, peaks around the end of January, and taper off around April. I really hope this is not what happens with COVID, because that means this has barely started. If true, we can expect at least 2,000,000 deaths by March. And that is aside from the "pandemic" problem; because with those numbers, our medical facilities will not be able to keep up, and the mortality rate will start going back up.

☹️ Last March, when I first looked into the COVID-19 numbers, I thought there was a good chance this disease could kill from 6 million to 9 million in the US. I thought it would spread much faster, so I was way far off there. Now I just hope the final tally will be just as far off; but right now it seems too close to tell if we might actually reach that number.

Stay strong, stay healthy.

Data from ourworldindata.org:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?country=~USA&interval=smoothed&time=2020-03-01..latest

Influenza graphs:
https://www.google.com/search?q=influenza%20cases%20data&tbm=isch