Nice map, but still proves the point about red. All those Total Confirmed could be in a nice light blue with blue circles on the map, and many people would not be as worried for that factor alone.
Again, I am not downplaying the significance and impact of the virus, just how important they way we interact with the information and how it affects us.
As an epidemic, it should be graphed logarithmicly.
Currently it grows at a rate of 10x every 16 days or so, at least until 10% or so infected, assuming no countermeasures.
How about each point of red on a 256 color scale is, say, 16 hours of virus progress, or a week is 10 points of color. So at 0 red you are at least 3200 hours or 133 days or 4 months away from 200 red, which we'll fix at 10% of the population infected. 240 red can be 100% infected, so past 10% we give 1 point of red for every 2% infected in population.
The virus grows by 10x every 16 days, so every factor of 10 is 24 color points.
To make things simple, we'll assume each area has a population of 100 million.
100 million: 255 red
10 million: 200 red
1 million: 176 red
100 thousand: 152 red
10 thousand: 128 red
1 thousand: 104 red
100: 80 red
10: 56 red
1 infected: 32 red
We can then subtract based on your population. China gets -24 for having a billion people, USA gets -12 for having 300 million, Canada gets +12 for having 30 million.
SK: 130 red
Italy: 124 red
China: 120 red
USA: 78 red
Canada: 76 red
Note that controlled cases are counted here.
USA has 100s of uncontrolled transmission cases, canada has had 1. If we only count uncontrolled transmission (ie, not quarentined on a ship and tested and taking directly into isolation, or caught from travel to a known non-local hotspot), we get:
SK: 130 red (possibly much less due to extreme tracking measures, uncertain)
Italy: 124 red (they gave up on tracking, are just trying to isolate it into starvation)
China: 120 red (possibly much less due to extreme tracking measures, uncertain)
USA: 76 red (1/3 of US cases are unknown source at this point)
Canada: 44 red (almost all Canadian cases are known-source and isolated at this point)
Basically, this places USA 5 weeks away from Italy without measures being undertaken to stop it.
And the incubation period 0-2 weeks, so there should be a region where (known or not) you should have avoided going around in public in about 3-4 weeks from now as it was all over the place.
Likely areas in the USA are NY, California and Seattle, or also possible is a state that is undertested and has an outbreak nobody knows about yet.
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TL;DR this thing is more infections than the common cold. It grows at 10x every 16 days.
An area with 10 community infections is only a month behind a place with 1000.
Italy, which has more doctors per capita than the USA, has had its health care system collapse under the outbreak of 1000s of cases. The success rate of ventilators on elderly and those with comorbidity is low enough that they are triaging their use and letting people who could be saved die, because there are not enough ventilators.
USA on its current trajectory is 5 weeks away from a similar situation, because 300 unknown source people means about 300 people sick in the wild and untreated still spreading it.
In 16 days those 300 people are going to be 3000. In 16 more days they are going to be 30,000. In 16 more they are going to be 300,000. In 16 more they will be 3 million.
There are 62,188 full-feature ventilators in the USA. Upwards of 10% of those infected with Covid-19 need ventilation. So in 50-70 days the USA will run out of ventilators if they are moved to where they are needed with 100% efficiency, and that assumes we only use them for Covid-19.
Oxygen and CPAP type machines can be used (they are better than nothing).
But don't worry, you are more likely to be hit by lightning (today). Don't worry about tomorrow.
