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Editor's Note: This is a complimentary research note published by Director of Research Daryl Jones on March 18th. CLICK HERE to get daily COVID-19 analysis and alerts from our research team and access our related webcasts. |
"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat."
-Ralph Ellison
Key Takeaways
- The U.S. is now at 6,519 COVID-19 cases based on data from Johns Hopkins. This is up 40% from our note yesterday in less than 24 hours. Our projection for 10,000 cases by the weekend is intact.
- The WHO data yesterday showed a slight slowing in the growth rate of global cases, but that appears to be more of a timing issue as the Johns Hopkins data from today shows another acceleration and currently sits at 204,251 cases (up 14.0% from the WHO data yesterday at 4:30pm)
- European growth is accelerating basically everywhere, with a small silver lining perhaps developing in Italy
- Japan, China, and Korea remain in solid shape
U.S. Situation
- No meaningful change in the U.S. curve of infection, though the reporting from the U.S. government remains weak compared to other nations
- The math tells us that the U.S. infection curve continues to be on a path that parallels the worst outbreaks globally. Arguably in the last 24 hours from the same patient population size, the U.S. curve is growing at a higher rate than any other developed country ( 4400 -> 6500)
- The chart below from the New York Times highlights this exponential velocity.
- Key clusters in the U.S. -> New York, Seattle, San Francisco -> The New York tri-state area is the hardest hit
Global Situation
-While the WHO data, in terms of day-over-day growth looked a bit better yesterday, when we overlay it with the real-time data from Johns Hopkins as of today we see no real change in the curve
- Almost every country in Europe continues to grow infection rates at a rate of 20 – 30%+ per day with many new hot spots emerging, including Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Austria and the U.K.
- One small silver lining is that Italian infection growth appears to be slowing, albeit off a larger base. But we have had four days of slowing growth rates from 20% down to about 12.5%, which is a posiitve
- Given the widespread nature of the infection in Europe, we would expect travel to be shut down there for an extended period (4 – 6 weeks at a minimum)
- This article is worth a quick read about a small town in Northern Italian that tested everyone in the town. Not only did that help stop the spread, but it also highlighted that for every positive test of COVID-19 roughly ten patients didn’t show symptoms. → See HERE
- This was also corroborated by the following study we reviewed from the Journal of Science → See HERE
Asian Situation
- We won’t spend too much time on China, Japan and Korea except to say that there is no change and new cases by country continue to be in the low double digits
- We haven’t added a South American section, but that continent has now passed 1,000 cases
Economic Anecdotes
We pulled a few charts from our research team to show the impact of COVID-19 on various sectors of the U.S. economy. If you didn’t know, now you now . . . commerce is grinding to a halt.
1) Hotel RevPar -> down 33% last week (and going lower)
2) Real-time ride share activity
3) Worldwide Cross-Border Activity from Visa / Mastercard
