Sorry for the Delay

This morning I realized I had not shared my coronavirus prediction equation via this website, so I am posting a photo of it. I’m not industrious enough to type it out with an equation editor, so I used a chalkboard. Just wrote it down. It’s not neat.

Here you go. I said the equation was simple, and now you can see I meant it.

Now anyone who thinks I cheat can go back and check the figures personally, as long as they have some idea how to use a calculator. They can also go forward in time and see what the equation predicts on any date they choose.

Don’t choose next year. You’ll scare yourself. It’s not going to be accurate that far in the future. It goes up forever. It doesn’t include a term for the eventual deceleration of transmission.

The expression “exp” means “e to the power of.” It’s a handy notation that makes things easier to write. The expression “e” is Euler’s number. A with a subscript of 1 is the total number of cases on some day I forgot. I could look it up. Anyway, I needed this figure (which I rounded off to 300,000) to come up with k, the coefficient.

Today my prediction (posted yesterday) is off by about 3.6%, which means I got a better result today than yesterday. Does this mean anything? Probably not. If the error increases or decreases significantly over several days, I’ll think it’s important, but the difference between 4.2% and 3.6% is probably just noise.

I don’t know if the entire equation means anything, let alone its tiny movements. It has been working well for a number of days, however.

I was calling this the Coronavirus SWAG Equation, for “Scientific Wild-___ Guess,” but I thought about what the “A” stood for, and I thought about how I should give God the credit for doing so well, and now I call it the Coronavirus Grace Equation.

When it goes off the rails and starts predicting really bad results, I’ll call it The Devil’s Equation.

I kid.

The little bottle is Germ-X, a brand of hand sanitizer. It’s mostly full. You can have it for $7,000. That’s today’s price, mind you. It will surely go up.

This equation was posted elsewhere on the web some time ago. No one can say I made it up this morning. In fact, I haven’t made anything this morning, including breakfast. I overslept. Woke up at 9:26.

Who says college math isn’t useful?

MORE

Still no major celebrity deaths in America. Watching celebrity deaths may turn out to be a very good gauge of the severity of the disease. The press lies to us every day about the epidemic, but they can’t hide the lack of dead celebrities. If Bruce Springsteen or Will Smith dies, to pull two names out of a hat, we will know, and we will also know if they don’t die.

MORE

Can’t believe I forgot to mention this. Today’s actual figure was 1,216,422. My prediction was 1,172,227. And now you have the power to check my math.