Time to look at the numbers again

I’ve been busy and haven’t updated my spreadsheet for a week. Moreover, I haven’t talked about the numbers in probably a couple weeks. Here are some of the things I see, based on the numbers below and my spreadsheet (which tracks all of the variables below since the beginning of March):

First, the numbers of new cases are exploding. This has been well documented in the press, but these numbers help put it in perspective:

·        We’re firmly in our third wave of daily new cases. The first wave hit its peak at about 34,000 new cases a day in early April, and its trough in late May, at around 16,000 daily new cases. The second wave hit its peak at around 80,000 new cases a day in late July; its trough was about 25,000 daily new cases in early September. Yesterday, daily new cases hit 132,000. I remember there was much consternation after it first hit the 80,000 mark in late October. This week, not much attention was paid to the pandemic at all, as people were focused on something else.

·        The worst part about new cases is the 7-day rate of increase is growing. It reached 8% yesterday and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. During the second wave in July, that rate reached almost 15%. We may well be headed back there.

·        That would be terrible in itself, but even worse is the fact that new cases are increasing from a much larger base now. In mid-July we had about 78,000 daily new cases, so a 15% rate of increase meant an absolute increase of 11,700 daily new cases. Since the level of daily deaths yesterday was 132,000, yesterday’s 8% rate was 10,560, close to the July level. If we were to have a 15% weekly rate of increase at yesterday’s level of new deaths, we would have an increase of almost 20,000. But of course, when and if we do reach the 15% rate, we’ll have a much higher level of daily new cases, and the absolute weekly increase will be much higher than that.

·        When I first started doing these posts in March and April, I talked a lot about how powerful exponential growth is. Here’s a good example. Of course, if new cases and deaths were growing at the rates they were growing back then (deaths were growing at close to 100% a day then), the entire US population would be dead by around Christmas. Thank God for small favors.

·        Speaking of deaths, I’m predicting that average daily deaths for the week that ends today will be over 1,000. This is the first time this has happened since late August. Of course, this is better than the 2,000 level in the last week of April.

·        But since new cases were at 30,000 a day then and they’re 130,000 now, the lower level of deaths in April definitely isn’t due to the fact that we’re doing a better job of containing the virus! Rather, the clue can be found in the third number that I track, the ratio of deaths to closed cases. On April 30, it was 29.1%, meaning about 30% of people with Covid ended up dying. Now the ratio is 3.7%. Of course, this is due to the great advances made by health care professionals – although Donald Trump says they’re actually inflating the death numbers so they can make more money. Now that he’s lost, I wish he would crawl into a hole tomorrow and we’d never hear from him again, but I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.

Bottom line: Don’t look for the numbers to get better for a long time, and it’s inevitable they’ll get a good deal worse than they already are, especially because Trump has two and a half months left in his term. At least it’s not 50 ½ months.

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 3.0%.

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	5,771	824
October 31	5,998	857
Month of Oct.	24,332	785	107%
November 7	7,099	1,014
November 14	7,313	1,045
November 21	7,533	1,076
November 28	7,759	1,108
Month of Nov.	31,246	1,042	128%
Total March-Nov.	266,128

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 242,230

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 3.0% (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: 10,058,586

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 132,540

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 8.0%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 6,392,330

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 242,230

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 3.7%

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: 7.3%

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