We’re back in February

Remember February? Then there were starting to be warnings that the virus that had devastated Wuhan would find its way here. However, a lot of people (including me) believed the Trump administration’s claims that it had kept the virus out of the US by the “lockdown” on travel from China (although lockdown isn’t the right word, since 27,000 people came here from China – Hong Kong and Macau – in February. And even though 1,600 of those people were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure, the Trump administration was too busy denying that the virus was a threat to do even that. Priorities, priorities!). If the country had done the things it should have done, most notably get testing going quickly as some other countries did, we would be in a lot better shape even today.

Now there’s a variant of the virus spreading rapidly in England, and it’s already in South Africa and on the European continent (especially France); in fact, the majority of new cases in the UK are caused by this variant. It doesn’t seem to be more deadly, but it does seem to spread much more rapidly, meaning that, once it takes hold here, the number of new cases will grow even more rapidly than it is now (hard to believe, since we’re now well over 200,000 new cases a day, meaning more than 1 million new cases every five days). Of course this means more deaths, more businesses shut down, etc.

Just as in February, quick action could make a big difference now. Nothing fancy: ban travel with the UK, a nationwide mask mandate, ramped up testing – these would be a good start. Our problem in February was that our president wasn’t engaged on the virus, and in fact was doing his best to persuade the American people that it wasn’t a threat at all – despite what experts were telling him. What’s our problem now? It’s that our president isn’t engaged on the virus, and in fact is doing his best to persuade the American people that it isn’t a big problem at all – despite what experts are telling him (or would if he would talk with them).

So I’m not optimistic we’ll be prepared this time, either. Sad.

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 6.1%.

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.	83,446	2,692	218%
Total March-Dec.	357,811	1,166

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 326,772

Deaths yesterday: 1,841

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 6.1% (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: 18,473,716

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 200,109

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 9.0%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 10,807,172

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 326,772

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.