COVID-19 Update – U.S. Growth Continues on the Same Path (3/25/2020)

Editor's Note: This is a complimentary research note published by Director of Research Daryl Jones on March 25th. CLICK HERE to get daily COVID-19 analysis and alerts from our research team and access our related webcasts.

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin and see it through no matter what.”
-Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird”

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• No meaningful change in the trend of COVID-19 growth in the U.S. as infections continue to grow ~30% day-on-day and currently sit at 55,243 
• Globally, we continue on the path of 10% daily growth and global cases currently sit at 438,749, with much of the planet (Europe, North American, India, etc) on lock-down
• Europe is a bit of mixed bag with daily cases increases some places and declining others. Italy jumped back up again
• Korea, Japan, and China are still maintaining new daily cases at low rates

U.S. SITUATION

• As of 9:00 am EDT today, the U.S. had 53,192 positives, 709 deaths, 4,865 hospitalizations and had performed roughly 367,710 tests. This equates to a positive test rate of 14.5%
• The chart below shows the trends of new cases and tests by day as of yesterday going back to early March.  In the past two days, the U.S. has ramped up testing significantly.  It seems reasonable to expect that cases in the U.S. (assuming some lag on testing) will also spike in coming days

Approximately, 45 states are growing double digits daily. The hot spots in the U.S. with more than 1,000 cases are: New York, New Jersey, Washington, California, Michigan, Illinois, Florida and Louisiana

One note: the ability to get tested varies from state to state, so some states like possibly NY, may have more positives that aren’t considered high risk, so weren’t tested and that don’t appear in the numbers

Global Situation

We had highlighted some slowing of daily growth rates in Europe yesterday.  While that still seems to be the general trend, some regions also picked up day-over-day. The updated table of Italy, Germany, France, and Spain is below:

Italy continues to be a focus. Clearly, the day-over-day growth rates have been slowing and it looked like daily new cases peaked three days ago.  As of today, daily new cases have picked up again. We show this is the chart below:

Italy has been the hardest hit in Europe and has the highest case load. It was also the country that implemented mandated lock downs. It’s reasonable to use Italy has a bit of road map for the U.S. in terms of cases peaking and the curve flattening via lock downs

Time frame of Italian lockdowns:

• February 21 – Initial lockdown in Lombardy of 50,000 people. Intended to last until March 6^th →200 cases
• March 8^th – Italian Prime Minister announced the quarantine zone to cover most of Northern Italy impacting 16 million people → 6,000 cases
• March 9^th – Quarantine measures were expanded to cover the entire country → 7,300 cases
• March 11^th – The quarantine was increased and all businesses were shutdown, except essential services → 10,000 cases
• March 21^st – The lockdown was again tightened and all industry was shutdown → 47,000 cases
• March 22^nd – The lockdown was tightened again banning all outdoor physical activity → 53,000 cases

We may finally be seeing a slowing of cases in Italy, but even through that series of lockdowns, the daily case count continued to increase exponentially. 

COVID-19 is in 196 countries globally. Over 30 countries have more than 1,000 cases. In terms of developed nations, Switzerland currently has the most cases per 1MM population at 1,217. The U.S. is currently at 181 on this metric

Asian Situation

Again, no change in most of Asia:

• China +146
• Korea +76
• Japan +39

The hot spots to watch in the western pacific region are:

• Australia 1,709 cases, +313
• Malaysia 1,518 cases, +212