Could there really be 33,000 COVID cases in Colorado today?
First of all please, congratulate me because I actually was able to update my data today! That is two days in a row. Lets keep this streak alive! Anyway as I started to think about COVID testing here in Colorado I was interested in seeing if there were any compelling trends. As you can see there are two major swings in this data. Basically it looks like there were 2 days were testing dropped dramatically. I would assume that had to do with some bottleneck in the process.- not all that interesting.
More interesting is this article from Denver 7. They are reporting that Colorado Health Officials are extrapolating data from other states to propose that the number of COVID cases in Colorado is likely between 12,000 and 33,000!
So lets think about that for a minute…if we say the number of confirmed cases has been going up ~16% daily and we really have 12,000 cases today…all things holding constant, in 14 days we could have over 95K cases in Colorado. If the number today is really 33,000 that would mean in 14 days we would have ~263K cases in Colorado. That is a lot of sick people. The crazy thing is that if you then assume a 2.6% of sick people die, then you have between 2800 and 7900 people dying from COVID in Colorado alone.
That is scary…
When we start to think about it this way that puts this whole thing into perspective. Now this is not a prediction. The only thing I think we can all agree on is that the information we get about this disease is changing daily. So maybe this little math exercise is enough to make people want to be a little more strict on their social distancing.