Another thing we’re not doing…

The Times published a good editorial two days ago about the new coronavirus variant discovered in the UK, that’s caused a lot of European countries to ban travel from the UK. While that is probably necessary for the US to do as well, it does point to one very important problem: The UK is by far the world leader in sequencing the coronavirus genome, whereas the US is something like number 43 on the list. So this variant may well be rampant in the US, and we will never know it until it becomes obvious.

In other words, the US needs to ramp up sequencing now, to get a better handle on whether and where the new variant has already gotten a foothold. There are a lot of policy decisions that can’t be made until we have the sequencing data we need.

Will the federal government heed the call? You can be sure of one thing: If it’s up to Trump, the answer will be no. The only hope is that a few people at the CDC will stop cowering in fear for their jobs and actually agitate for this – and if Dr. Redmond, who will quite deservedly be removed from his post come January 20, will for once do the right thing on his own. It would certainly be a refreshing change.

And we certainly need all the help we can get. As I was updating the numbers, I just noticed that two days ago we passed 4,000 deaths in a single day. We passed 3,000 for the first time on December 8. Given that new cases continue to set records, there’s no reason to believe that this trend is going to change anytime soon. Note that at the current growth rate, deaths in December will be 221% of those in November. It is likely that deaths in January through March will all grow by at least that rate, too.

I’d like to wish you a merry Christmas, but that seems inappropriate after this post. I wish you a safe one!

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). The projections are based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 6.2%.

Month	Deaths reported during month	Avg. deaths per day during month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
Month of March	4,058	131
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept.	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct.	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov.	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec.	84,547	2,727	221%
Total March-Dec.	358,912	1,169

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 334,218

Deaths yesterday: 3,401

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 6.2% (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 one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 18,917,152

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 232,342

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 8.8%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 11,101,866

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 334,218

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 2.9%

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.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 11.2%

For comparison, the previous peak for this rate was 7.8% in late July, although the peak in early April was 22%. The rate got down to 4.0% in early October but has been climbing most of the time since then. This is published by Johns Hopkins.

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