Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021,
The Troy Press
This page is a part of our broader Covid-19 coverage:
We invite you to contact us and tell us what you think, and ask questions - what do you want to know that the media isn't telling you? We genuinely want to answer all good questions if we can. You can mail us, use our comment section on the main Covid-19 page. And as we are an all-volunteer team, if you want, you can make a donation.
New Jersey's Statewide curfew began March 16, state-wide lockdown began March 21, and is set to end June 5. All casinos, gyms, and movie theaters were closed; restaurants and bars were only allowed to remain open for delivery and takeout. On March 21, as the number of COVID-19 cases in the state surpassed 1,000, Governor Murphy announced a statewide stay-at-home order, requiring that all non-essential businesses be closed indefinitely by 9 p.m. that day. No end date scheduled but green-space was re-opened on May 2.
In recent times, the rules are changing as the state is trying to come to terms with "a new normal."
Hand-Made Graph At Right
Click here for
full size.
Click herefor
the Automated version.
Click here for
the data in
csv format.
Hand-Made in
full size.
The only of these to ever drop is the number of active cases, which is bound to go down some day. So, other than active cases, it's the rate of change that's important. Most of our other graphs are focused on showing you these changes in the right scale since here, any squiggle from one day to the next is pretty well lost to the eye.
If you ignore the numbers, New Jersey's experience seems to be pretty good, clearly approaching some kind of peak, which is great - it's a better looking curve than, say, California since CA hasn't got a peak yet. But if you then actually look at the numbers and compare that way, NJ's experience is pretty bad; California, a much more populous state, doesn't today have as many cases as New Jersey did a month ago! Ouch!
New Jersey is also lagging in recoveries, even though it has so many more cases. Even with more than 50% more cases than CA, it only has just over half as many recoveries. This is not good.
Hand-Made Graph At Right
Click here for
full size.
Click herefor
the Automated version.
Click here for
the data in
csv format.
Hand-Made in
full size.
These data were created by taking the daily values for the data used to create the Totals graph above, and comparing with the previous day's value and computing the difference. New Cases and Newly Active cases closely match most of the time and this is because testing is nearly exclusively being done on those people who present themselves for health care. (And, folks, this is definitely "doing it wrong.") However, when people recover (or die), that also has an impact on the daily changes to the number of active cases, and therefore the change from one day to the next which drives how these data are collected.
As with the Totals graph above, New Jersey has a nice set of graph lines here, clearly having peaked through the first three weeks of April and declining to present. The New Recoveries values seem suspect to this analyist's eyes.
The huge negative spike in newly active cases along with a big spike in recoveries was a VERY notable occurance. The USA as a whole experienced a similar thing around May 12 and New Jersey clearly contributed to it. This is the kind of thing we're hoping to see in the numbers everwhere and a lot more frequently.
Hand-Made Graph At Right
Click here for
full size.
Click herefor
the Automated version.
Click here for
the data in
csv format.
Hand-Made in
full size.
The purpose of this graph is to show two values also shown on the "Totals" graph above with much better scaling. These are the total deaths and the total recovered cases.
Here's where the bad news of New Jersey's experience shows clearly: the Deaths Total line has climbed steeply as compared with other states, and the recoveries isn't very strong considering the large number of cases. Recoveries remained flat for a super long period and whe it finally crossed 2 thousand cases, the total case count was around a hundred and thirty five thousand cases! ... Remember, the blue and orange lines are totals, while the rest reflect daily-changes.
The good news is that the rise in deaths is showing a clear flattening in the last two weeks. We hope it continues.
Hand-Made Graph At Right
Click here for
full size.
Click herefor
the Automated version.
Click here for
the data in
csv format.
The number was too small to warrant graphing.
This was broken out, again, for better scaling because the variation is simply lost at other scales.
This graph suggests that if New Jersey doesn't do anythning stupid now, the worst is already behind them. Today is comparable to early April, but in between it has been pretty rough. The good news is that in Early April the total cases was around 20 to 30 thousand (20,000 to 30,000), and now it's around one hundred fifty thousand (~160,000) with about one hundred thirty thousand active (130,000) and yet with a comparable death rate. This illustrates New Jersey has learned quite a bit and is doing a better job today than it was in early April.
One interesting thing to observe here are the sharp down-peaks to a pretty consistent value. The down values represent health-care organizations that don't report on Sundays! And the consistency of that gives a good idea regarding how many don't report on Sundays!
As an exercise for the curious, grab the CSV data file we provide and point it to your favorite "calc" program like, Microsoft Office's Excel, or "Calc" in OpenOffice, or, our favorite, Libre-Office Calc, and pick a start date, select the columns and have it calculate a sum for these. Then divide that number by how many days you've selected and you can easily compute the average over any period you wish, and thereby get rid of those pesky peaks and valleys for any period you choose. ... It has been suggested we do a "rolling week" average - or something like it - but before we do the work, we'd like to hear if here's significant interest in that, and if so, for which data sets.
Hand-Made Graph At Right
Click here for
full size.
Click herefor
the Automated version.
Click here for
the data in
csv format.
The concept behind "Case Doublings" is to try and get a handle on whether one is winning the war against a pandemic or not. It's driven by how many cases of confirmed infection are recorded. For any given day, there are two questions to be answered:
Looking backwards always gives a stable line because the daily variations shown and discussed above aren't present.
The longer it takes for the number of cases to double, the better you're doing against the pandemic, and the CHANGE in the number of days indicates whether your current actions are helping or hurting.
The Doublings-Past data helps support the analysis results from earlier graphs, namely New Jersey appears to have the worst behind it. We say this because, looking back, the doubling time has been more than a month and growing for over a week now, while we believe the average time from Covid-19 infection to either recovery or death is about three weeks. And therefore, the case load in medical facilities should be declining. The big concern now is that there are so many outstanding active cases - around 130,000!
Do let us know what you think or even make requests or ask questions! Please either comment on our main Covid-19 page's comment section, email us, or perhaps, as we're an all volunteer team, donate to our cause.
