Alaska COVID-19 Count March 28 - 17 More Cases For A Total Of 102 [Updated]

First, my updated summary in calendar form so you can see, day by day, the how many cases are being confirmed.  The first confirmed case was reported Friday March 13.  Fifteen days later we have 102 confirmed cases, 6 hospitalized, and 2 dead. (One was an Alaskan who caught the virus and died in Washington State.)

CONFIRMED COVID-19 CASES ALASKA MARCH 2020
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
new/total	hos=hospital		12th  = 0/0	13th = 1/1	14th = 0/1	15th = 0/1
16th = 0/1	17th = 2/3	18th = 3/6	19th = 3/9	20th = 3/12	21st= 2/14	22nd= 8/22
23rd=14/36	24th =6/42 1 hos 1 dead	25th = 17/59 3 hos 1 dead	26th = 10/69 3 hos 1 dead	27th =16/89 5 hos 2 dead	28th = 17/102 6 hos 2 dead

The highest daily increase in confirmed cases was Wednesday March 25, with 17 cases.  [UPDATE: March 28, 2020 8:50pm The three days since the number of new cases was 10, 16, and 13.  Whoops, I messed up, it's 17 more today, not 13.  I'm going through and fixing this.] If you look at the last of the State posted charts (daily tests given) you'll see there was a spike of tests given on March 23.  Did it take two days for many of them to be reported, resulting in the increase on the 25th?  Tests dropped sharply on the 24th, then up slightly on the 25th and more on the 26th, then dropped again.  

I mention this because the number of positive cases may well be related to how many tests were given, but that's speculation.  Graphing the daily tests along with the daily new confirmed cases is a worthy project, but beyond the time I'm ready to commit here.  I see my job here as providing the raw data over time, since the State replaces its page with a new one each day, so people get just the latest snapshot.  And there's enough ambiguity about how long it takes for test results to get reported that any correlation could be messed up by time lags.  

Now, the State's charts for today, Saturday, March 28, 2020.  (You can see the daily updates here.)

Note that the scale of this chart (above) changes from day to day, as the numbers on the left hand axis increase and the number of days increases.

The Municipality of Anchorage (Anchorage and Eagle River/Chugiak) have just over half the state cases, which roughly proportional to its share of the statewide population.

My chart tracking the increases daily.

Alaska Covid-19 Data NewFor... by Steve on Scribd

I decided to try a graph to see what it would add.  It definitely shows the exponential growth of positive cases in Alaska.  When they talk about "flattening the curve" they're talking about keeping this from going up too high by having fewer and fewer new cases each day.  We can do this by not testing or by being strict about self isolation.  (Just to be clear, the first option doesn't actually do any good, it just means we don't have any data to know what's happening.)

The steepness of this curve can be manipulated by widening the columns.  This was the default width in Numbers (Mac's version of Excel).

To see all these posts (and all the State charts since March 12, 2020, click here.