Covid-19 Update | April 6 at 9:46 AM

So, I took an extended weekend away and have re-examined data. Just an FYI, I had pulled my money out of the stock market about 3 weeks ago and today, I’m putting it all back in. The data is looking good. The last day I looked was April 1st and today I put in the data from yesterday. So, since it’s not really on the mainstream media feeds and panic seems to be the norm, where’s this good news data? Well, the highly cited University of Washington model seems to be getting it wrong. They have revised down their death estimate and severely revised down their hospital resource utilization numbers. Yesterday, New York even reported their hospital census statewide decreased by 600 beds. During the 4-day period between April 1 and 5th, not a single state doubled their number of cases. And the national average was 57%. Here’s where the numbers get really interesting. It’s because of staying at home and/or closing non-essential businesses, right? Not really. The average incubation time for CoVID-19 is 5 days, so for these orders to have an impact on number of cases, they would have had to have had at least 3 days to have an impact. If you look at the % increase in the 14 states with no orders to close non-essential services OR have a statewide stay at home order imposed on or before April 1st, those states had an increase of 54%, so below the national average. The lower end of death estimates on the University of Washington model now sits at 49,000 nationwide and we are trending on the lower side. They had predicted 1745 deaths yesterday with a range of 1166-2775; we had 1165. New York and New Jersey still account for half of all cases in the US and over half of the deaths. LA and MI are having serious problems right now, and will be the epicenter of the next wave of deaths. Detroit and New Orleans both have high population density, poverty, and obesity as serious issues that will lead to bad outcomes. At the state level, Florida continues to do relatively well despite our large population of elderly. We are at 580 cases per million, almost half of the national average and Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade make up 58% of all of the cases and 55% of all of the deaths in the state. Backing up to local news, Bay county has 24 cases with a case rate of 141 per million, which is still among the lowest in the state and we did just barely pass West Virginia but are below the average rate of cases of every other state in America. If you are taking the recommended precautions you are going to be more than fine. From a risk perspective, getting behind the wheel of a car is still far more dangerous for the average American than CoVID-19. Have a great day, watch less news, and enjoy all of the outdoor recreational opportunities that Governor Desantis has encouraged all healthy Floridians to continue to do.