Italy’s death rate declining slightly, New York next?

Italy has had the most difficult experience with the coronavirus out of any other country in the world. They have suffered over 10,000 deaths as of March 28 which is crazy considering that on March 7 the death toll was only 233.

Despite having a healthcare system ranked as one of the best in the world, other factors have contributed to the country having one of the highest fatality rates for coronavirus infections.

Italy is now seeing the rate of spread decline and the number of deaths declining each day.

Below you can see that the rate of new coronavirus cases in Italy has been declining and also that the rate of death has also been declining.

It’s still a lot of people who are getting sick and a lot of deaths happening in the country but you can see that it looks like the peak of the growth rate was around March 20, so they are about 10 days removed from the peak of growth. 

Also, according to CNN, the total number of deaths is declining slightly each day. There were 756 new deaths related to the coronavirus in the last 24 hours in Italy, a drop from 889 new deaths on Saturday and 969 on Friday.

So it looks like the total number of deaths happening each day may have just peaked about 2 months after the first case but it might still be too early to tell. These numbers can really fluctuate from day to day.

It will be interesting to see how things continue to play out in Italy over the next couple of days, as we will be able to see if they truly have reached the apex. I would expect things to really begin to slow down.

It could also be a very telling experience for New York.

Italy had its first known coronavirus infection at the end of January and so they may have peaked a little under two months after their first case. Italy also initiated its locked down on March 9, so about five weeks after the first case.

New York had its first coronavirus case known on March 1 and went on lockdown on March 22. So social distancing went into effect after only three weeks which I think will help flatten the curve for New York a lot.

New York is already reporting a slow down of cases, which means they may be way ahead of Italy since it took New York less than one month to see growth rates declining versus Italy where it took almost two months.

Because New York has such a dense population, I think you could argue that other cities will likely have an easier time containing the contagion. 

Now, obviously a lot of factors go into that like the state of healthcare, socioeconomic levels, lock-downs, etc. 

But other cities might be looking at close to a month to reach their peaks of growth, depending on how social distancing was followed. Then, it is just a matter of waiting for the Apex in the total number of cases per day.

This is all my speculation based on the facts and there are a lot of variables that determine things like the spread rates, death rates, etc. Every state will have its own curve.

But I think that we will know a lot more about the rates for containing this virus in the next 7 to 14 days and likely be able to predict how other states will deal with their own curves.