--Tom Petty
I'm starting to study the numbers daily. Mainly Ohio and Florida. Every morning praying for a drop in the number of new cases. I need to see the down side of this curve. Today the news was good, but that has to be consistent over time to make up for variations based on how and when the data is being collected and reported.
It's been a tough day. Maybe it was the dreary rain all day long. Or the three and half straight hours of Zooming with my students. Maybe it was falling behind yet still further with my grading and not even getting close to the pile of ungraded tests waiting in the last thousand plus emails I've received over the past month or so. Maybe it was having Babs gone all day (she had work she needed to do in her classroom today) and handling the boys on my own. I don't know. But right now it's tough, the waiting for this all to end and the next chapter--whatever it looks like--to begin.
Over the past three days the rate of increase slowed by quite a bit. Currently there have been a total of 1,503,688 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 in the United States. This represents a rate of increase of just 3.7%, the lowest rate of increase we've had and about 25,000 fewer cases than I predicted. The rate of increase for total deaths has slowed by more than half, now at 2.7% with 89,812 total deaths, more than 5000 less than I expected. Based on these rates by Thursday, May 21 we should have 1,559,304 total cases and 92,240 total deaths.
Ohio and Nebraska are down! And in Ohio that's a six day trend now. 8 more days and we'll hit two weeks of steady decrease in the number of new cases. Please let it be. Florida is up for the sixth day in a row so I can't start their countdown yet. But I'm hoping. I really want to visit my family in Florida this summer, but I'd like to feel that I'm not putting them at risk. We will see. Here's the numbers for total cases:
Florida: 46,434 total cases, 0.21% of the population
Ohio: 28,455 total cases, 0.24% of the population
Nebraska: 10,348 total cases, 0.53% of the population
Good news for all three states. Deaths plummeted across the board with Ohio hitting its lowest number of new deaths since May 3 and Nebraska its lowest number since April 27. Ohio and Florida are back in the double digits and Nebraska is back in the single digits. As far as the totals:
Florida: 1,996 total deaths, a rate of 4.3%
Ohio: 1,657 total deaths, a rate of 5.8%
Nebraska: 129 total deaths, a rate of 1.2%
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