Right now we sort of are in a new normal with slow declines largely led by declines in the NYC area with the rest of the country basically being flat to some places with increases. Likely to be that way for awhile. That's alot better than where we were a month ago though. You have positive factors (some percentage of people wearing masks, some percentage of people engaging in social distancing. warmer weather - recent study suggests that could result in up to a 25% decrease in transmission rate) that right now appear to be just offsetting the negative factor (more mobility - though mobility is still well below where it was in early March), keeping the overall R0 just below 1 for the country as a whole.
I tend to keep focus on 2 metrics (7 day rolling avg for both to smooth out the natural data reporting issues)- positive case % (the news people who focus on just cases are overly pessimistic - as you test more you should see more cases - but if your testing is rising faster than the cases the positive % goes down), and deaths (which is unfortunately a pretty significant trailing indicator - but still give some sense of what is going on).
Unfortunately GA is going to have a bad death day today (it is already one of the 8 worst of the pandemic and still has the 7 pm update to go). GA has been basically flat in terms of deaths and cases, but positive case percentage has gone down consistently which is good.
Still avg 20K+ new cases nationwide and 1,300+ deaths nationwide every day is not good on an absolute scale. Yesterday was the worst day yet in terms of reported cases worldwide.
GA is avg about 30 deaths per day and 625 cases. To make a comparison the total confirmed deaths by flu for GA for 2019-20 season through the first week of March was 84. So about every 3 days we are having more people die from the virus than died in 6 months from the flu in the state.
Just sort of a mixed bag. Not great, not horrible.
fivethirtyeight.com has a nice dashboard where they are tracking 9 models. If you use them as an ensemble they have been almost dead on in terms of death predictions with the current US death numbers basically trending right around where the middle of the model projections come out. We are likely looking at hitting 100K deaths the day after Memorial Day and likely somewhere between 150-175K by the beginning of August.
As I said two weeks ago. I'm happy with the direction things are heading, not real happy at the pace. Late June/early July is going to be a time period to watch. That is when some (but not all of the models) project a summer spike - not as large as April but enough to register. We are just barely doing better than treading water which isn't going to allow the economy to take off in any significant way.
This study by 4 UCLA Economic researchers looked to untangle the direct effect of stay at home orders on unemployment claims. They came up with the stay at home orders resulting in roughly 25% of the unemployment claims, the rest were due to other factors (consumer confidence, self-imposed stay at home, supply chain disruptions, etc).
https://voxeu.org/article/unemployment-effects-stay-home-orders
This would largely line up with what we have seen in GA so far where unemployment claims continue to be sky high even 4 weeks after relaxing orders. This past week was the first significant drop in weekly unemployment claims, but they are still 15X above average (180K vs 12K).
It's also been a mixed bag for states that opened up the earliest. GA has been able to keep its transmissions rate likely just under 1 given its positive case %, but Texas is seeing positive case % increase for the last week so even with more testing that suggests that their R0 is likely above 1 right now and they are having some outbreaks.
IMO we are in a better place than we were 1 month ago, but we aren't even close to where we were at the beginning of March and not likely to be there for a long time.
But I do think we are going to get at least some college football later this year and that possibility excites me.