Well then, as dispassionately as I can, remembering that these are people’s lives being discussed, I’m going to say that it is almost exactly a week since the global total number of COVID-19 cases reached 3 million and, looking ahead, I said 4 million cases would have been counted in a little over 2 weeks from then. I was wrong. It won’t even take 2 weeks to get there.
We are now at 3.6 million exactly a week after I made that statement so, by Saturday May 9, +/- 1 day, get ready for the 4 million.
You know what that means of course, about two weeks after that, say by about May 22, there will be 400,000 deaths recorded.
How do I know that? Well, that has been the pattern for the last 5-6 weeks, allowing for some minor discrepancy in the early weeks due to a great many known cases not being reported by some countries until some 2-3 weeks ago, and until those blue and (what would you call that) orange(?) lines in the graphs begin to waver with more than slight deviations from straight, or make a turn to the right, that will not change. In particular, for as long as this situation lasts (and I have no idea how long that will be – I only see trends not the future – well, maybe I see something of the future, but I wouldn’t take that to the bank) the blue line is our forecast yardstick, allowing us to see 2 weeks beyond the current death count, and really quite accurately.
Two weeks ago, April 20, the total cases were 2.5 million. Two weeks later, today, May 4, there are 250,000 (a quarter million) deaths.
One week ago, April 27 (as per my last COVID-19 post), the case total was 3 million. So one week from now, say May 11, there will have been 300,000 deaths.
These are guaranteed figures. They are baked into the pie already. And we have the guarantee of the straight blue line and more or less straight orange line that this will be so.
Whatever the total recorded cases, the death count 2 weeks later will be ~10% of that number.
Ok. One step further. We already have more than 3.5 million cases so we can confidently predict when there will have been 350,000 deaths. We should have reached 3.5 million (according to my prediction last week) today, May 4 (which for me is within a few minutes of ending as I write this) but it was actually reached yesterday May 3. Why the discrepancy? Well, it seems that there was no usual weekend dip in new cases this weekend, bringing the expected total a day early. These things are never exact. Small variances will always occur and any forecasts I may make should be seen in that light. Allow a day, maybe two, each side of the anticipated date in every case. The general principle still applies.
Not Something Else 
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