NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Things are obviously bad in New York. That does not mean it is going to get bad everywhere. While Governor Cuomo says this is coming to a neighborhood near you, that seems unlikely. It is obvious that New York skews every statistic.  Let me show you exactly what I mean.

NEW CASES NEW CASES (PERCENT) DEATHS DEATH (PERCENT)
DATE US NEW YORK OTHER NEW YORK OTHER US NEW YORK OTHER NEW YORK OTHER
1-Apr 225,998 92,381 133,617 40.88% 59.12% 5,311 2,373 2,938 44.68% 55.32%
1-Apr 207,637 83,712 123,925 40.32% 59.68% 4,601 1,941 2,660 42.19% 57.81%
31-Mar 186,633 75,795 110,838 40.61% 59.39% 3,833 1,550 2,283 40.44% 59.56%
30-Mar 163,131 68,369 94,762 41.91% 58.09% 3,146 1,224 1,922 38.91% 61.09%
29-Mar 141,125 59,513 81,612 42.17% 57.83% 2,458 965 1,493 39.26% 60.74%
28-Mar 123,311 52,318 70,993 42.43% 57.57% 2,211 728 1,483 32.93% 67.07%
27-Mar 100,390 44,635 55,755 44.46% 55.54% 1,543 519 1,024 33.64% 66.36%
26-Mar 83,545 37,258 46,287 44.60% 55.40% 1,201 385 816 32.06% 67.94%

 

Since March 26th.New York is responsible for about 40% of the cases, which doesn’t appear to have changed very much. Since we are increasing testing all over the country, one would expect the number of new claims from outside New York to become a bigger percentage of the total. That is not happening. If anything, the opposite is happening.

While Governor Cuomo says the rest of the country will look like New York, the rest of the country is actually looking better than New York and the difference is increasing, not decreasing. This caused me to look again at New York and a map of where the cases are located. Almost all of the activity is coming from major metropolitan areas like Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany and the New York area. The more rural parts of New York are reporting results similar to the rest of the country.

The death rate in New York is also skewing results for the entire country. This is actually good news, because it may mean that all the projections are off:

DEATH RATE ANALYSIS
TOTAL DEATHS NEW DEATHS  (PERCENT OF CHANGE)
DATE US NEW YORK OTHER US NEW YORK OTHER US NEW YORK OTHER
2-Apr 5,311 2,373 2,938 710 432 278 15.43% 22.26% 10.45%
1-Apr 4,601 1,941 2,660 768 391 377 20.04% 25.23% 16.51%
31-Mar 3,833 1,550 2,283 687 326 361 21.84% 26.63% 18.78%
30-Mar 3,146 1,224 1,922 688 259 429 27.99% 26.84% 28.73%
29-Mar 2,458 965 1,493 247 237 10 11.17% 32.55% 0.67%
28-Mar 2,211 728 1,483 668 209 459 43.29% 40.27% 44.82%
27-Mar 1,543 519 1,024 342 134 208 28.48% 34.81% 25.49%

 

These numbers are as of right now; they will probably be higher by end of day.

Today Governor Cuomo said he expected New York to peak in 7 days. Previously he was saying it would peak in 30 days. He admitted that the number of discharges from hospitals in New York is higher than the number of new admissions. New York appears to be leveling off and may even have already peaked.

It appears that all of the dire predictions are from a model developed by Bill Gates. It is a truly frightening model, but it is only a model. While we should not assume that happy days are here again, we can see that the worst-case scenarios being trumped in the press and elsewhere are far from certain. Dr. Fauci went from predicting millions of deaths, to 200,000 to maybe 100,000 if things don’t go well. In order words, he really doesn’t know because no one has enough data to evaluate.

There are a lot of people saying we are expected to trend like Italy. New York is trending like Italy. But New York, while arrogant enough to think they represent the entire country, is still just New York.

We are doing a ton of tests and so we should expect more positive results. There are wide-spread reports of doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine and getting great results. If that is true, it should be showing up in a declining number of new deaths.

At least some people have a vested interested in making the COVID 19 virus look worse rather than better. Some sadly want this to get worse so they can blame Trump. Others may even be making money off the situation. In addition there are politicians who are getting a lot of free air time that will go away when this is over.

This reminds me of when I visited a lab that produced insect repellent. One of the top executives for that company was excited to report that because of weather conditions they predicted a lot more mosquitoes to hatch during the coming year. They gleefully expected a banner year for insect repellent sales. To him, that was great news. The rest of us, not so much. There are winners and loser for every situation good and bad.

We will know a lot more by next week. We can expect deteriorating results from places like Detroit, but that may be offset by improving numbers in New York. We will soon know. Remember that ultimately the number of positive tests matters, but not nearly as much as the number of deaths.

TDM