On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Department of Health added COVID-19 Trajectory Animations to the information it releases publicly.
According to the Department of Health website:
The trajectory animation was inspired from a recent YouTube video, “How To Tell If We’re Beating COVID-19.”
The basis for viewing our data in this way is that the number of new cases is proportional to the number of existing cases. When disease transmission is uncontrolled, exponential growth will occur until effective public health control measures are in place (note that this can take weeks to be evident in the data, depending on the situation).
When you view the animation, you are seeing a time-lapse plot of the average number of newly reported cases over the last 7 days (y-axis) against the cumulative number of reported cases (x-axis) by region. Please note both axes are on a log10 scale.
You can see that all regions and the state as a whole, have been traveling along the trajectory of exponential growth for several weeks now.
Visualizing the data in this manner provides some insight as to when exponential growth for a particular region stops (i.e., drops off the curve). And when exponential grow stops, we are starting to see a decrease in the growth rate of new cases and hopefully the “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Stay tuned to News talk 104.1 & 1600 WEJS and talkwilliamsport.com for developments on this story.
