A Simple COVID-19 U.S. Growth Model for the Next Two weeks

I’ve been studying a lot of data since the first realization that the U.S. was going to have to deal with this. We all want to know what is going to happen next. The president and his team last night gave a briefing with the estimate of 200k deaths. The IHME released this very good model. Truthfully, the IHME math is beyond me, I am but a simple caveman number cruncher using antiquated tools (i.e. spreadsheets). Once anybody starts using greek squiggles in equations, I usually tap out. There HAS to be a better way of looking at this problem. There HAS to be a simpler way of modeling the growth and predicting at least the near future.

Disclaimer: I am not a scientist. I am not a medical professional. I like analyzing data and have some experience. I am not criticizing the federal projections or the IHME model. The IHME is really good work, I think they have a lot of people smarter than I working on it (I could use some PhD candidates to do some modeling work for me right about now).

Counting Hay in a Haystack

The problem with the COVID-19 crisis is that we have absolutely no idea how many people have it or how fast it’s growing. We spend a lot of time counting cases. Cases are people who have had a positive test confirming they have COVID-19. We announce new case numbers publicly. We proclaim whether they are up or down. However, since we are limited in test kits and we have lag in results, we can never trust the numbers.