Is The Coronavirus Spread In The U.S. Really Slowing?

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The coronavirus outbreak has now affected nearly 190,000 people in the U.S and has claimed more than 4,000 lives in the country. There is one metric that matters more than all else: acceleration of the coronavirus spread. This acceleration is slowing down. Not zero yet. Not negative. But it has been slowing down for the last few days.

Acceleration is the rate of change of the change itself. The spread of spread per unit time. It is NOT to be confused with the change, which is new cases added each day. For clarity:

  • Velocity of spread = new cases added each day
  • Acceleration of spread = change in velocity, i.e., the change in new cases added each day

The rule is simple. When acceleration is negative – things won’t be the same.

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Below is some data for new cases in the United States to understand the evolving picture of acceleration better, and the dashboard here shows our forecast timing for when negative acceleration is possible:

  • Mar 22 = 9400 new cases
  • Mar 23 = 10189 new cases → 789 more new cases than Mar 22
  • Mar 24 = 11075 new cases → 886 more new cases than Mar 23
  • Mar 25 = 13355 new cases → 2280 more new cases than Mar 24
  • Mar 26 = 17224 new cases → 3869 more new cases than Mar 25
  • Mar 27 = 18691 new cases → 1467 more new cases than Mar 26
  • Mar 28 = 19452 new cases → 761 more new cases than Mar 27
  • Mar 29 = 19913 new cases → 461 more new cases than Mar 28
  • Mar 30 = 20297 new cases → 384 more new cases than Mar 29

 

What’s important?

Look at the 2nd number in each of the rows above – the more new cases per day. That’s the daily acceleration. This increased from 789 on Mar 23 to 3869 on Mar 26. But the last few days it has been less, with 384 more new cases per day on Mar 30.

For Coronavirus fear to subside, this number needs to go to negative. While we’re not there yet, it looks like acceleration is headed downwards. We looked at the acceleration of spread in South Korea, China, Germany, Italy – across countries to forecast cases in the U.S.

 

Does that mean there will be no scarcity of ventilators, hospital beds, or care providers?

As we see above, the acceleration, while reduced, is still positive. There are unfortunately still more new cases each day. In fact, in one scenario, we expect the number of COVID-19 cases to reach around 720K. However, if this trend continues, there will be fewer new cases each day, and things will get better. Markets will improve – from stock markets to grocery stores, and people won’t be scared to pick up a coffee from the corner Starbucks or McDonald’s. Until then, let’s continue to be scared, paranoid – continue that social distancing and isolation. It seems to be meaningfully negating the unbalanced force of spread, so far.

Our dashboard -28% Coronavirus crash vs. 4 Historic crashes builds a complete macro picture. It complements our analyses of the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on a diverse set of large companies, including smaller “portfolios” of Work- and Learn-at-home stocks to recovery in transportation. The complete set of coronavirus impact and timing analyses is available here.

 

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