I recall in February and March that one of the metrics that was being highlighted was the "doubling rate", or how long we could expect for a 100% increased in Covid-19 cases. This number was used to instill caution/fear (depending upon which side one might be on).

Is a "doubling rate" a useful metric at all at this point?

For my home county, I've been tracking the case numbers very closely and have watched how long it has taken for the cases to double here.

Early on, it was as low as 4 days, but that was when the numbers were going from 24 to 48.

It then slowly grew to bounce between 28 and 35 days between mid-may and early June.

Then the spike happened and it reduced again down to 4 days but this time it was going from 700 to 1400.

Now we have a total case count over 4000 and the "doubling rate" is over 35 days. (calculated by looking backwards from today's case count to how many days back it was at 1/2 of today's number)

Is this metric of any use in analysis or decision making after the initial introduction to the population?

Doubling rate is useful imo because people who are bad at math can understand it. When the doubling rate is less than 5 days people are real serious about maintaining distance when they need to leave their house and more importantly only leaving their house when required

Philip J Fry said:

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It should be hard to determine if hospitals will be overrun. At least, that's the excuse we were told was shutting down the economy.

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Not really.

BadMoonRisin said:

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Philip J Fry said:

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It should be hard to determine if hospitals will be overrun. At least, that's the excuse we were told was shutting down the economy.

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Not really.

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Dumb autocorrect. Yes, it should not be hard.

I thought hospitals in Texas were overrun about a month ago. Enough to justify a shutdown.

The only thing we know for sure is doubling time is "two weeks"

This is just my personal opinion from thinking about it for less than five minutes, but it seems like a nice way to describe the rate of change. It's another way of describing acceleration/deceleration of spread. You can do some nice calculus with it.

Virus is harder to spread than we were sold.

I know several families that only 50% of households caught it.

I know one nursing home that all the residence caught it but none of the staff did.

Still tracking how long it takes to double the number of cases.

For Hays County, as of yesterday, it took 58 days to "double" the number of cases.

For all of Texas, it's over 40 days.

For the US, it's over 50 days.

It has taken 97 days for the number of confirmed Covid cases in Hays County to "double" to today's number of 5995.

aggiesed8r said:

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I thought hospitals in Texas were overrun about a month ago. Enough to justify a shutdown.

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A very few locations for a few days were overwhelmed. Patients were shipped to other hospitals. That is no justification for all that we have done to restrict people.

In Hays County, the average daily increase in case count for the last 2 months is 0.3%.


When considering recovery rate, the average daily change in active cases for the last 2 months is -1.5% For the last month, the average change in active cases is -1.9%.

We have gone from over 2800 active cases to approximately 1100. Hays county also does not count a patient as "recovered" until they have contacted them and confirmed no symptoms of the patient or anyone in their household for at least 3 days. With only 5 people performing these verifications, they are necessarily behind in accounting patients as "recovered".

In the last 2 months, the number of hospitalized covid patients has gone from a high of 25, to the current 9.

And this is after several weeks of schools being opened.