orchard.it

Today I’m taking a look at why the United States Covid-19 death curve is following neither the same trajectory as most European countries, nor that of most South American countries. It seems to have the same initial peak as Italy, but then a post-peak surge that matches Brazil: So, what’s going on? Well, first it’s worth understanding why Italy and Brazil are on such different journeys. The figure below shows the 4 classic curves for Temperate and Tropical climates in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Italy obviously has a Northern…read more

It’s been more than 3 months since Update 19, and your experience over that time will depend on where you live. At the risk of generalizing, if you are in a relatively small European country with a strong central government that shut-down effectively then it’s likely that high infection rates were limited to one or two initial areas (Lombardy, Catalonia, Greater London), so you will have seen daily case numbers fall by >95% and stay low for several months : Whereas if you live in a large country with a…read more

For the first 3 months of the outbreak I laboriously copied data by hand from Worldometers into an Excel spreadsheet and tried to identify interesting patterns to share with friends in Italy, Germany, the UK and US. This was particularly useful in the early days as we could report how badly the UK and US were underestimating the impact that the virus would have on their populations, and later on we could see how effective lockdown measures proved to be in the countries that implemented them quickly and early. Recently,…read more

After several weeks in lockdown, several parts of the world are starting to ease restrictions on movement. Concentrating on our 4 countries, probably the graph which best illustrates this dynamic is our slowdown-chart. We’ll concentrate on cases as they lead deaths by 2-3 weeks : The US is yet to dip on its way to a million cases; the UK has levelled off; Italy has stalled, but without seeing a true decline, and Germany is in free-fall. There have been a few headlines recently predicting that the UK could end…read more

Very brief update today – just with the latest Rt charts from Italy, the US, and now also England (sorry – not found reasonable data for Scotland yet). For those of you who are interested, here is the whole calculation laid out.