After a week’s worth of data, things in Tennessee look a little better than they did last week. It may still be too soon to see the impact of re-opening, but early indications are better than I had assumed last week.
On April 26th, there were 4,959 active cases. During the last week, there were 29 deaths and 1,287 recoveries (Tennessee reports recoveries, unlike some other states like Georgia). On the 28th, the number of active cases decreased by 67 as recoveries exceeded new cases. Overall, the number of active cases increased by 2,404 over the last week. However, over 800 was due to an outbreak in a prison. Not counting, this, the trend is not looking too bad so far.
Using the SIR model and not counting the prison outbreak, there is a slow exponential growth of 3-4% each day in the number of active cases. The total number of confirmed cases as of May 3 is 13,177. The model predicts this will increase to about 36,000 by the end of May. At the current fatality rate of 1.5%, this will mean an additional 339 deaths in May. In this forecast, the total number of confirmed cases will continue to grow to 100,000 by the end of June. At the current fatality rate of 1.5%, that means an additional 1,300 deaths during May and June.
This is a tentative forecast, as there is still a great deal of uncertainty and lags due to re-opening, but the past week was encouraging. I will continue to update this periodically as new data is reported. We should have a much better sense of how things are going a week from now.