Dispatch from Coronaville: Forging Our Own Path Forward

"In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes"
                                                                                                    -Judges 21:25

We have no king here in America. We fought a war of independence to be sure of it, and true to form we resist any kind of kingly edicts from those in authority. Every man does what is right in his own eyes, even if it is to our own detriment.  Live free and die is our motto (or something like that).

As for me and my house, we've decided how we will move forward.  Before we start taking non-essential trips out, we will need to see evidence that our state meets the first of the Trump Administration's disregarded qualifications for re-opening--two weeks of steadily declining numbers of cases. I will track the data myself, as I do for this blog. We won't wait on leaders to tell us when it is safe. We will look directly at the data and follow the guidance of those experts that know more than we do before we make changes to our own stay-at-home policies.  This is less than ideal, but to me it's the best we can do under the circumstances.

Here are the numbers from the past three days. The total number of COVID-19 cases now stands at over 1,375,000, a 4.5% increase and about 33,000 fewer cases than I predicted.  The total number of deaths is now 82,290, also a 4.5% increase and about 3,200 short of my prediction. Based on these rates I would expect 1,436,875 total cases by Friday, May 15 and 85,993 total deaths.

Looking at our benchmark states, Florida and Ohio flip flop again. Florida is down and Ohio is up on both new cases and new deaths. Meanwhile Nebraska drops to its lowest number of new cases since April 30 while losing another ten people to the virus over the past three days.

New Cases

Total Cases
Florida: 41,915 total cases, 0.19% of the population
Ohio: 25,257 total cases, 0.22% of the population
Nebraska: 8,734 total cases, 0.45% of the population

New Deaths

Total Deaths
Florida: 1,778 total deaths, a rate of 4.2%
Ohio: 1,436 total deaths, a rate of 5.7%
Nebraska: 103 total deaths, a rate of 1.2%