See the Effects of Shelter In Place

The core of the plot above and the projections were from a week ago March 25th. Notice that the dashed lines cover days that have already passed (I’m publishing this on April 2nd.) Santa Clara just got an amazing new hospitalization dashboard up and running. (I’ll post about that later.) But the first thing I was most excited to do was to grab the newest hospitalization number and see where it landed in my old projections.

Good News: New hospitalization number well below previous projection. Keep up the good social distancing work.

The old projections from last Friday expected Santa Clara to have 353 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. The lower bound of that projection (with 95% confidence) was 230 patients. Santa Clara as of April 1st had only 198 hospitalized patients. This means that “flattening” the curve and social distancing really is having an impact. Keep it up everybody.

Future Focus: Get a new hospitalization trendline.

I don’t have Santa Clara’s hospitalization numbers for March 26th through March 31st so I don’t have hospitalization data points in the gap in the graph above. I will get three new points over the next couple of days and project forward to see what Santa Clara’s new doubling time is. We’ll look to see when Santa Clara’s hospitals are likely to be at capacity.

Additional Good News: Raw Case Numbers Indicate Broader Testing.

Also notice that Santa Clara’s case numbers in blue are also falling below the projection. However they aren’t falling as far below the projection as the hospitalization numbers are. This tells me that more testing is starting to happen in Santa Clara county and that more mild cases of COVID-19 are being caught.