As of yesterday, total worldwide confirmed cases of COVID-19 are calculated to be 3,913,643 by worldometers.info and increasing at about 100K new cases per day. By this weekend, the total cases should cross 2^22 = 4,194,304.
In 20200417F Day 108: Surfing the Multiverse back through a Pandemic Wormhole and 20200321S Day 81: Three to the Fourth Power is Eighty-One, I documented the exponential growth of worldwide COVID-19 cases. I assumed an initial outbreak date of Dec 12, 2019. This led to the following:
- 2 weeks to go from 1 to 10 cases by Dec 26, 2019
- 2 weeks to go from 10 to 100 cases by Jan 9, 2020
- 2 weeks to go from 100 to 1000 cases by Jan 23, 2020
- 1 week to go from 1000 to 10000 cases by Jan 30, 2020
- 5 weeks to go from 10K to 100K cases by Mar 5, 2020
- 2 weeks to go from 100K to 250K cases by Mar 19, 2020
- 2 weeks to go from 250K to 1M cases by Apr 2, 2020
- 2.5 weeks to go from 1M to 2.5M cases by Apr 19, 2020
- 2.5 weeks to go from 2.5M to 4M cases by May 7, 2020
It’s been a total of 21 weeks since Dec 12, 2019. There are reports that the initial outbreak case may have happened earlier than Dec 12. Today, I tweeted an answer to a question from @DanielleFong in which I researched the first case to be Nov 17. That would be 128+45=173 days ago, or almost 25 weeks ago. While confirmed cases were definitely at least doubling every week in the beginning of the pandemic, the recent doubling rate is about half the initial rate. By this weekend, the first case will be 176 days ago and the number of doublings will be 22. 176/22 gives exactly 8 days doubling time.
If it was even doubling every 8 days, we would have gotten to 4,194,304 cases from Nov 17th, 2019 like this:
- 2019-11-17u: 1 case
- 2019-11-25M: 2 cases
- 2019-12-03T: 4 cases
- 2019-12-11W: 8 cases
- 2019-12-19h: 16 cases
- 2019-12-27F: 32 cases
- 2020-01-04S: 64 cases
- 2020-01-12u: 128 cases
- 2020-01-20M: 256 cases
- 2020-01-28T: 512 cases
- 2020-02-05W: 1024 cases
- 2020-02-13h: 2048 cases
- 2020-02-21F: 4096 cases
- 2020-02-29S: 8192 cases
- 2020-03-08u: 16384 cases
- 2020-03-16M: 32768 cases
- 2020-03-24T: 65536 cases
- 2020-04-01W: 131072 cases
- 2020-04-09h: 262144 cases
- 2020-04-17F: 524288 cases
- 2020-04-25S: 1048576 cases
- 2020-05-03u: 2097152 cases
- 2020-05-11M: 4194304 cases
For posterity, Danielle’s question …
surfing the universe 
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