It is an unhappy statistic, but without context it doesn't help in analysis. It's worth reposting something canoerebel linked to understand it - the total figure will go up, because the virus is working its way through Europe and Nth America. It only has a marginal footprint in South Asia and Africa - possibly for genetic reasons. Possibly due to sunshine. They are a couple of the theories. So within a few weeks the total figure will have a declining rate of increase. And it will still have a death toll that is only a small percentage of that for influenza.
My point is that it's continuing to still increase and until we see a lower rate of acceleration, a number like 38,000 (a number you said would be an over estimate) is not very far away - if the delta in new deaths does not change, we will hit 38,000 in about 10 days. It is useful to explore current trend lines in this particular context because 10 days is not very far and in order for that number to be achievable, we would need to shift to a pretty aggressive decline. Since I'm only using actual data, my perspective is not dependent on any regions that are not already impacted.
Something that would have made me more open to thinking that this quick timetable might be possible the past few days was if Italy's new daily deaths had started to slow down like we've been hoping. But that hasn't started to happen yet. Their more aggressive quarantine status started to go into effect on March 9th so we're almost at 2 weeks. Hopefully it starts happening soon but there's also the additional conflation of health care services being saturated which seems like it is complicating things. My concern is that both the United Kingdom and Spain are starting to have anecdotal reports that their system is getting strained as well. Hopefully they can be more proactive learning from Italy (such as taking over empty hotels, in the case of Spain).
WHO numbers are lower than both Worldometers and John Hopkins University references, still at around 11,500. I don't know why that is. Unfortunately the WHO dashboard doesn't make it very easy to examine the death rates.
I do fully acknowledge and agree that death rates (to make sure I'm using the term more correctly, I'm referring to the percentage of cases that are fatal here) are higher when the health care system is strained beyond capacity. But most of the messaging (at least around here, Alberta Canada) has been around ensuring that health care systems are not strained by taking measures to mitigate the spread. China took measures more draconian than my province, and I would be surprised if anything the US and Europe did were more extreme.
EDIT: I'll see if I can find graphs of just Italy and China somewhere and try to analyze their trend lines, since both at least have "health care system capacity" issues. Hubei and Italy are both similar in population size as well.
; Julia Child
