30 more death in holland.
3000 people infected.

My region is getting locked down as of midnight tonight as well. Fun times.

They're still on lockdown. Hopefully a second wave doesn't happen when they drop it.

I saw my town preparing for covid19 yesterday. On my way back from my run I drove by the local cemetery where an excavator was busy digging new graves. We're well prepared!

Still seeing plenty of people frolicking in the streets. Looks like we're gonna be fine.

What are you talking about? The demand for essential goods is not down at all. In fact it's actually up because of all those hoarders. Turns out people are still eating things. Agriculture is doing just fine and will continue to be fine because people will continue to need food. Same goes for water, electricity and internet.

You know how many people will be on the sunny side of this after we got the worst over? More than 90% of the population.

#BREAKING: NY, CT, NJ, and PA will temporarily close all barber shops, nail & hair salons, tattoo shops, & similar services in our four states effective tomorrow at 8PM.

These temporary closures are not going to be easy, but they are necessary to protect the public health.

— Archive: Governor Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 20, 2020

Andrew Yang's nonprofit is giving money to Americans impacted by the coronavirus.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/B99CygwgCd3/?igshid=16xgr2u5r4ngj

Per capita is not that useful to measure the country wide effects of social distancing measures.

To flatten the curve you need to slow the growth rate. We don't know what is the most effective combination of measures to halt the growth and reverse it. We have some countries that went into total lock down (France, Argentina), countries that went into near lockdown (Israel) and a lot of countries with various closures while warning people to stay inside, to countries that try to keep normal life going as much as possible. Or a country like the USA that does its own thing per state.

So yeah, for the states, per state comparison would be more helpful. Per capita is not that relevant, population density is more relevant but also cultural differences and age distribution.

The amount of hospital beds per 1,000 is also an important factor which ranges from 1.3 per 1000 (Mexico) to 2.3 (UK/Ontario) to 13 per 1000 in Japan. The average for the world is about 2.7 beds per 1,000. Yet for flattening the curve the total available in a country is of course more relevant. Each country has a different peak it can deal with. (Or each state, yet since the whole US is in trouble, distribution of patients will be more difficult)

It will take a lot of computer modelling to determine the best 'package' of social distancing measures for each country / state based on all those factors.



Anyway for now it's pretty useful to compare the growth between places with different measures to see what's more effective and what's not enough. The active cases in the USA are growing faster than in Italy, no surprise since they're still doing much less than Italy. And while the US has more time before getting overwhelmed, note that every day later is another exponential increase in the peak case load. China already showed that once the growth factor finally goes under 1.0, your active case load still increases by a factor 2.5 before that peaks 13 days later. If it had peaked one day earlier, the active case peak could have been 10K less, 2 days earlier -> 23K less, 3 days earlier -> 30K less, a peak of 28K cases instead of 58K active cases.

You can't be too early, you can easily be too late.

These updates from you are always interesting.

But even more interesting would be 2 additional columns for the number of deaths in both countries at those points. While the US are growing faster, it's also a bigger country with more hospitals, so those can probably take more patients before getting overwhelmed. But if the death rate would grow just as fast already, I would summise that the US hospitals are either not ready for so much intake, or that people not going there because of the cost of treatment until it's too late.