BC comes even cleaner than the US and the rest of Canada — it expects the novel coronavirus pandemic will continue to impact daily life until the summer, followed by a potential second wave of the virus in the fall.
https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/covid-19-likely-part-of-b-c-life-until-summer-says-dr-henry-five-more-deaths
I don’t think you will see a similar admission from US health authorities, until just before their April 30 deadline, when they will announce another extension.
Dr Fauci mentioned “a glimmer of hope” based a decline in the number of new cases reported recently. It would be nice to see that on a graph. It’s a real simple graph but I couldn’t find any. I uploaded a spreadsheet of all the case data into a google spreadsheet and then generated this chart. To be able to compare the US and Canada, I plotted % change in new cases rather than actual number of cases.
This shows US new cases declining by 51% to 15% (March 20 to March 31), but with a bump back up to 25% from March 26-28. You have to get to 0% to see flattening of the curve.This shows what is wrong with reading too much into this data – changes in the number of new cases is erratic. You can especially see this in the spike in Canadian new cases on March 26. This was due to some labs clearing a backlog of Covid-19 tests, which naturally led to more cases being reported than on other days.
Another graph that I have not been able to find is cases by % of total population. All case graphs I have seen plot actual number of cases, which makes it hard to compare countries with very different populations. Here’s the chart, generated from the same spreadsheet.
This shows several interesting things:
– The US is on a similar trajectory as Italy. Canada is on a lower trajectory.
– US, Canada are about 20 days behind Italy, 10 days behind Spain.
– It doesn’t look like any of these countries are close to flattening the curve yet.
In the US and Canada, health authorities expect the peak in mid April.
