As I can see on the chart, about 500 newbies who received at least one merit from September 17, 2018 until October 1, 2018, have been ultimately banned. Another 250 newbies who were supported in October 2018 have also been banned. Currently, the number of banned newbies does not increase significantly.
Interesting, it implies that massive merit abusements in September last year mostly ended with perma bans. After that wave of abusements, the figure of banned accounts fell dramatically. There are some reasons, maybe people understood that they won't get anything good by abusing the system, eventually they might all with perma bans. Or maybe, their main accounts dried out of airdropped merits, so they are not able to abuse and help their newbies move up to Junior members one more wave.