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As a little exercise (not to be taken seriously, but I might as well share the results) I took the UK's daily death figures from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ and for each day I took that day's figure plus half the previous day's plus a quarter of the day before, and so on. 1/
That gave me the following sequence:
29, 29; 47, 62, 64; 87, 91, 99, 136; 107, 166; 262, 389, 402, 382; 569, 846, 990; 1181, 1295, 1267, 1069, 1317, 1595.
I've put semicolons as a rough indication of where a new power of 2 is passed, to give an idea of a logarithmic scale. 2/
29, 29; 47, 62, 64; 87, 91, 99, 136; 107, 166; 262, 389, 402, 382; 569, 846, 990; 1181, 1295, 1267, 1069, 1317, 1595.
I've put semicolons as a rough indication of where a new power of 2 is passed, to give an idea of a logarithmic scale. 2/
It looks as though the slope is going down noticeably. (I'm not sure, however, whether this website goes by date recorded or date of death. In the latter case, the more recent numbers could go up quite a bit.) I took that combination of numbers as a way of smoothing .... 3/
out the curve, but it was only partially successful. But it does seem to show a fairly consistent 3-day doubling time until the number passed 1000, and it now seems as though it will take a lot longer to reach 2000, ... 4/
which is what we'd get after a sustained period of 1000 deaths per day. This suggests to me that the UK isn't that far out of line with other European countries. It also suggests, rather painfully, that if we'd done everything a week earlier, ... 5/
then the number of deaths would have been about four times smaller. That would have been an awful lot of lives saved. If you prefer the half-full version, it's good we didn't wait another week, or the numbers would have been about four times as large. 6/6
