Covid-19 NYC Stats - A Ray of Hope

Here are the reported Covid-19 cases/Day in NYC that can be seen on the NYC COVID-19 data website, updated on 4/7:

To get a better idea of the trend, given that the data appears to have seasonality on a 7 day period, we average the last 7 days & get:

Now the trends are pretty clear. Up to around the 16th, the data is exhibiting exponential growth. Then the growth rate starts dropping, as people started working from home and practicing social distancing. At that point, the growth looks like it became linear.

Once official social distancing efforts started, the slope dropped. From around 3/30 to 4/4, starting 7 days after NY went on PAUSE, we see the cases per day leveled off. For the last few days the trailing average number of cases per day has been dropping.

So, according to this data, it looks like social distancing broke the exponential growth, making the growth linear, and PAUSE has flattened the growth.

While the last few days show a welcome drop in the daily number of reported cases, this cannot be trusted because there's a substantial time lag for the data to be reported.  For example, the latest update revised many of the previously reported numbers.  None the less, the trends calculated with the previously reported data look pretty similar to those calculated today.

Of course, it's also possible that the number of reported cases per day is dropping because people know the hospitals are overloaded. If they're not too sick, they might be avoiding the hospitals, and potentially not be counted. Hopefully, this is not the case, and the new cases/day stays low enough for long enough that the hospitals (and everyone else) can recover.

So, there's a ray of hope (at least in NYC) that social distancing is working, but we'll have to keep it up and see how things proceed.