An encouraging development



Hello to my (new) friends in Romania! I had a huge number of hits within a 3-hour period yesterday afternoon from Romania, where people seemed to be reading a number of my recent posts. I’m glad to see this, of course, and I hope you’ll continue to read - but I’m a little mystified by this. If somebody could drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com and explain this to me, I would appreciate it.

If you just read my posts in the email feed, you missed the one I put up on Friday, since I mistakenly put yesterday’s post up before the feed came out. If you’d like to read Friday’s post, go here.


I’m again omitting my usual table of projected deaths today. Reported deaths were exceptionally low on Friday, and yesterday’s reported number was the lowest since March 23. I’d like to think this is good news, but I think the July 4 weekend has abnormally depressed reporting of deaths. Of course,the numbers always go down during the weekend and on Monday since many state and local reporting offices are closed, but I think the number of closed offices may be abnormally high this weekend. I’m going to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday to project deaths again. I don’t want to be proclaiming great news today, then in mid-week sheepishly acknowledging I’ve been (once again) misled by a statistical fluke.

Of course, the actual numbers below are all updated. There is one change that seems to be unambiguously good: The ratio of deaths so far to total closed cases so far (closed cases equals deaths plus recoveries) has just dropped to 9% - meaning that an increasing percentage of cases are ending with recovery, not death. I first started reporting that on March 26, when it was 41%. It stayed in the range of 35% to 43% until April 24, when it started a steady decline to its current level – hopefully, that will continue.

Why is this number important? Because it shows the percentage of cases of Covid-19 that result in death vs. recovery. The fact that this is going down – and will hopefully continue to go down – could indicate that hospitals aren’t overcrowded now (although that idea is being tested now in Florida, Texas and Arizona), as well as that the medical profession is getting better at preventing Covid patients from dying.

On the other hand, this number is still high relative to other countries like South Korea, where it’s 2%. And it’s especially high relative to Vietnam, where, with 355 cases so far, they have 0 deaths – meaning their rate is 0%. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for us to reach 0%, and we could only hit 2% if we had an astronomical increase in cases (as opposed to the merely humungous increase that we’re having now). Of course, having a lot of cases is a bad thing in itself, since just being hospitalized with Covid-19 can be a terrible and financially devastating experience, as a medical worker pointed out in this recent post). But we can certainly do even better than 9%.


I. Total deaths
Total US deaths as of yesterday: 132,318
Increase in deaths since previous day: 211
Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 3% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 3% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in the reported deaths numbers, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases
Total US reported cases: 2,936,122
Increase in reported cases since previous day: 44,894
Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%
Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 13%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:
Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 1,260,619
Total Deaths as of yesterday: 132,318
Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 9% (vs. 10% yesterday)
For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post. Short answer: If this percentage declines, that’s good. It’s been steadily declining since a high of 44% in mid-April.


I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com

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