23K QHPs enrolled today at HC.gov as of 6:26pm; est. 44.5K total QHPs for the day?

A very nice find by Twitter follower @rwhide...this post from April D. Ryan about President Obama giving a pep talk to the Healthcare.Gov team:

Enrollment on March 15 at 2pm on the ACA website was 15,000 and counting.

UPDATE to this story - as of 6:26 PM – Around 23,000 so far for today have enrolled for healthcare.  Almost 300,000 people logged into the healthcare.gov website today, Saturday, March 15, 2014.

OK, until today, I've been projecting March QHP enrollments to be around 43,000 per day (pre-Surge).

Let's see if we can break the data points above out.

23,000 as of 6:26pm (let's call it 6:30pm) is 1,243 per hour.

A straight-line projection (23K in 18.5 hours) would mean around 30,000 per day.

However, it was also 15,000 enrollments as of 2:00pm (1,071 per hour), and 1,778/hour between 2pm and 6:30pm. Obviously the rate is low in the middle of the night (midnight - 8am), ramps up throughout the day and will presumably taper off again as we approach midnight. Still, I think it's safe to call it more like 32,000 for today in particular.

However, this is also only for the Federal exchange (HC.gov); it doesn't include the 15 state exchanges, which made up around 28% of the total enrollments in February.

Assuming that the March ratio between the Federal and State exchanges is about the same as it was in February, that means that the state exchanges should rack up an additional 12,500 or so enrollments today.

That would bring the grand total for today specifically to around 44,500.

(whoops, sorry...made a calculation error earlier that had it at 47.2K; sorry about that...)