Posted by It is Saturday, 29 February, 18:23 hrs Athens, Greece time.
A good friend sent me about an hour ago the link to Johns Hopkins University’s “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by Johns Hopkins CSSE” and I started looking at the data.
One graph caught my attention.
It shows the new confirmed cases (red bars) and the new recovered (green bars) per day. I noticed an interesting reversal which I have annotated on the graph and I would like to share it.
Until 18 February, there are more new confirmed cases per day than new recovered cases. However, this changes on the 19 February.
On this day, the new recovered cases are approximately 1800 whereas the new confirmed cases are 489.
This continues until today. The new confimed cases today (29 February) are approximately 1600, whereas the new recovered are 3000. This implies that the umber of existing cases today was reduced by at least 1400. Given that the total confirmed cases are 85688, the total deaths are 2933 and the total recovered are 39761, the total existing cases are 42994.
If this continues, the number of existing cases will decrease continuously. The question of course is how fast this will happen.
In the hypothetical case that every day the total number of existing cases is reduced on the average by 1400, it will take 31 days to eliminate the phenomenon.
Of course this is just an indicative calculation, but it shows that we need to exercise caution until the end of March at the earliest.
In another post I will make some comments on the data, aiming to gain a better perspective on what they really tell us.