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Day 7 – March 23, 2020

The lack of data over the weekend left a bit of a gap… which I filled in with some guesswork. I know where we were on Saturday, and I know where we are now. How we got here looks to be pretty consistent, but the next few days are more important than the last few. We are tracking very closely to the US, trailing by 10 days… just before things started getting really out of hand down there.

It’s important to note that I’m tracking new cases — not active cases. It was good news to hear that 100 cases in BC considered active have been resolved to “cured”. More than 300 in Canada overall.

As time goes on, we can look forward to that number of resolved cases growing, but note that its growth doesn’t affect tracking new cases. Those will always go up. In fact, at some point, it’s (hopefully) likely we will have “negative” days — where there are less new cases than resolved cases… but the idea of these graphs is to simply track the spread (and control) of new cases. What we do with them is a whole other question, and I’ll be happy to offer my opinion on that as time goes on. So far, comparing it to what’s going on elsewhere in the world, it’s pretty good. And will gradually look a lot better if you all just #stayhome!!

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:26:39-07:00March 23rd, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Fact, Question, Idea, Canada, News, British Columbia, Data|10 Comments

Day 4 – March 20, 2020

We’re still at relatively low numbers, tracking pretty closely to where the US was 10 days ago. It’s a continual rolling 10-day window to see how effective our efforts have been. It’d be really nice to see that red line detach from the blue one and continue straight across with no upswing and it’d also be very nice for our neighbours to the South to see their line flattening out.

The colour coding on the rightmost two columns of numbers signifies change from the previous day. The growth factor is a comparison between today’s new cases vs. yesterday’s. The column to its right is the percentage increase of cases nationwide. Green is good, because it implies a smaller increase than the previous day. A streak of green days in a row would be very nice to see.

Needless to say, especially this early in the game, these numbers are very susceptible to how many tests are being administered and who’s being tested. As time goes on and numbers get bigger and the data is more generalized, it’ll all mean more and be clearer. The localized clusters we’ve witnessed (especially in B.C.) are not indicative of the entire country. If we based our assumptions entirely on what’s unfortunately happened at the Lynn Valley Care Center, we’d be appropriately far more worried.

Shoutout out to Dr. Bonnie Henry and Adrian Dix, whose 3pm updates are not just informative but also reassuring. And to the sign-language guy… if we are all as passionate in treating this as seriously as that guy is with the way he conveys the message, there’s no doubt we’ll be ok.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:26:40-07:00March 20th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Game, Dr Bonnie Henry, Numbers, Adrian Dix, Data, Country, British Columbia, South|0 Comments

Day 3 – March 19, 2020

I added a couple of rows and columns of interest. Mark Twain said something like "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics". Indeed, there are many ways to paint different pictures with the same colours. This simple chart has grown in complexity and I've received a lot of comments and some criticism from people.

To be clear, and I'm not a statistician… I was curious how Canada's response, at this critical time, looks compared to three other cases… Awful, Bad, Bad-then-good. It's still early to tell, and I have my opinion… but pictures are worth more than words, so here you go.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:26:40-07:00March 19th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Canada|0 Comments

Day 1 – March 17, 2020

There’s a table going around showing what’s happened in Italy and the US so far. Here it is, with Canada added in… and a couple of rows of extrapolated data. I added the graphs, and what they show is simple — it’s up to us, ie Canada, to do everything we can with respect to flattening the curve. It’s not too late, because it’s still a straight line… but there’s zero wiggle room. In a perfect world, that red line stays straight, stays well-below those exponentially-growing green and blue lines, and eventually flattens out and goes down to zero. We, today, are where the US was a week ago and Italy was 2.5 weeks ago. And neither of those are trends we want to follow. Listen and follow what we’re being told. They are strict guidelines for a reason; they work.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-11-28T19:48:09-08:00March 17th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Follower Favourites, Travel Stories, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Data, Respect, Work, Canada, Italy|23 Comments