The Pandemic Blog

As I did yesterday, I’m dispensing with the projections of deaths, since they once again have changed very little – because the 7-day growth rate is virtually unchanged. However, I do have my usual summary of yesterday’s numbers at the bottom of this post. Below is the same table I showed in yesterday’s post . In that post, I focused on the last column, the ratio of deaths to closed cases. Now I’d like to focus on another thing I noticed in the table: The US ratio of deaths to total cases (in the fourth column) is right in the middle of the other countries. Our ratio is less than three times South Korea’s. Why is this striking? Because there has been agreement for a long time that lack of testing capacity was severely constraining the case numbers. If we only test people who have symptoms of Covid-19, we miss the larger number who are infected but don’t have symptoms at all, or who have mild symptoms but decide that getting a test is too much of a hassle. At first, I proje

I’m not bothering with my usual Numbers section today, since the 1-day and 7-day rates of increase in deaths and cases haven’t changed at all, and the ratio of deaths to closed cases remains at 17%. The projected deaths numbers are close to what they were yesterday. I haven’t discussed the ratio of deaths to closed cases for a while, although I’ve been reporting it. To refresh your memory, this is the ratio of total Covid-19 deaths so far to “closed cases”; closed cases is the sum of deaths so far and “recoveries” so far. The fact that the US rate is 17% means that, of all closed cases so far in the pandemic, 17% of them have resulted in death. This is down substantially from the initial value of 41%, in late March, when Worldometers started reporting recoveries. But it is still quite high – it seems to mean that, if you’re determined to have a “case” of Covid-19, the odds are close to 1 in 5 that you will die. I’ve been periodically comparing the US performance in this ar

The 7-day average rate of increase in total COVID-19 deaths looks like it’s fallen 2-3 percentage points since last week. This means that daily deaths for this week will be close to 1,000 for the first time since the week of April 4. It also means the daily deaths number has continued its decline since it peaked at 2,633 for the week of April 18. This of course has once again lowered my projected deaths for May and June, since they’re computed by projecting out yesterday’s seven-day growth rate in total deaths. Will daily deaths in fact continue to decline? That’s simply not too likely. Most of the drop recently has been because the New York and New Jersey numbers have come way down from their peaks. But meanwhile, at least half of the states have rising case numbers, as they’ve eased off on lockdowns. For example, in Wisconsin, where the state Supreme Court invalidated the governor’s stay at home order two weeks ago, the number of cases hit its highest level so far yesterday.