It seems like we haven’t “turned the corner” yet. Or maybe we have?

I need to confess that I’m responsible for the recent drastic increase in new Covid-19 cases in the US. It has been about a week since I last looked at the numbers and updated my spreadsheet (although I was certainly reading about the increase in news stories). If I’d been doing that every day like I used to, this would never have happened. To prove that point, I was updating my spreadsheet at least every 2-3 days lately (before that, I updated it every day), and the numbers hardly changed at all in the last month or so – and if they changed at all then, they went down. But I didn't do that for a week, and now the country's going to hell in a handbasket. I apologize for this.

Here’s what I found this morning:

·        As you probably know, the US logged a record number of new cases on Friday, surpassing the previous record set in July. More importantly, the 7-day percentage increase in cases grew from 5.1% on October 17 to 5.4% yesterday. That might not seem like too much until you consider that, at the current level of cases, every .1% increase equates to a little more than 8,000 cases. So daily new cases are up by about 24,000 in just seven days.

·        The 7-day rate of increase in deaths, which had fallen almost continuously since its peak of 640% on March 28 (in other words, total deaths were close to doubling every day. Had that trend continued, the entire US population would have been dead by early May. Keep this in mind the next time someone says we overreacted by shutting down most of the economy in March and April) was at a record low of 2.2% on Oct. 17 and was 2.5% yesterday.

·        The ratio of deaths to closed cases declined from 4.0% to 3.9% over the past week, most likely due to continued improvements in treatment. The fact that the rate of increase in deaths is now going up again comes in spite of this improvement, meaning it’s almost certainly due to the increase in cases.

·        The most disturbing news is that the test positive rate for the US has jumped from 5.2% on October 15 to 8.9% yesterday (although Worldometers.com did point out that they think there are a number of problems with the published rates, and they are working with the data gathering authorities to straighten these out. Of course, that might result in the numbers going up or down).

In the debate on Thursday, President Trump asserted that the US has “turned the corner” on the pandemic. Unlike the vast majority of his other statements during the debate, this wasn’t a lie. We have certainly turned the corner just in the past week. The only problem is that this is a turn for the worse, not for the better.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into the projected numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 2.5%.

Note that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4 weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks previous.

However, once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays - after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no significant intervening changes.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5
March 21	244	35
March 28	1,928	275
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889
April 11	12,126	1,732
April 18	18,434	2,633
April 25	15,251	2,179
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	12,592	1,799
May 16	10,073	1,439
May 23	8,570	1,224
May 30	6,874	982
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
June 6	6,544	935
June 13	5,427	775
June 20	4,457	637
June 27	6,167	881
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
July 4	4,166	595
July 11	5,087	727
July 18	5,476	782
July 25	6,971	996
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
August 1	8,069	1,153
August 8	7,153	1,022
August 15	7,556	1,079
August 22	7,552	1,079
August 29	6,675	954
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
September 5	5,961	852
September 12	5,310	759
September 19	5,696	814
September 26	5,353	765
Month of Sept.	22,809	760	75%
October 3	5,102	729
October 10	5,091	727
October 17	4,933	705
October 24	5,651	807
October 31	5,794	828
Month of Oct.	23,590	761	103%
	234,140

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 229,284

Deaths reported yesterday: 903  

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 2.5% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. 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: 8,746,953

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 81,210

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 5.4%  

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 5,698,965

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 229,284

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 3.9%

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 41% at the end of March. But a good number would be 2%, like South Korea’s. An OK number would be 4%, like China’s.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 8.9%

For comparison, the recent peak for this rate was 27% in late July, although the peak in late March was 75%. This is published by Johns Hopkins. As of 10/2, rate for New York state: 1.2%. For Texas: 6.0%. For Florida: 10.9%.  For Arizona: 6.2%. For California: 2.8%).

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