We’re averaging more than 3,000 Covid deaths every day. Now the CDC says that will get much worse.

I hadn’t reported the numbers from my spreadsheet since New Year’s Day. I was stunned to see how much the situation has deteriorated since then. The most appalling change is my projection for total January deaths (based just on deaths so far and a continuation of the current 7-day rate of increase in total deaths). As you can see below, that projection has jumped by 22,000 since 1/1.

Unfortunately, it’s likely that by March we’ll look back on January as the good old days, when we only had a 9/11’s worth of deaths every day, rather than perhaps a 9/11 with a Pearl Harbor thrown in for good measure. That’s because the CDC announced yesterday that the new highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus, which was first noticed in the UK about two months ago, will be the dominant form in the US by late March.

This new variant isn’t inherently more deadly, but just the fact that so many more people will become sick means that deaths will rapidly increase, likely aggravated by more hospital overcrowding – and consequent triage of cases - like we’ve seen in California lately. As I pointed out in my last post, Ireland got particularly slammed by the new variant (as well as an unwise loosening of restrictions for Christmas). In just three weeks, cases per 100,000 population jumped 13-fold.

Of course, if cases per 100,000 were “just” to double in the US because of the new variant, we’d be looking at well over 6,000 deaths every day. And we’d be well on our way to over a million total pandemic deaths. Why do I say this? We passed 400,000 deaths yesterday, and deaths are now increasing at a rate of over 100,000 a month (and BTW, the world passed 2 million deaths this week, so the US accounts for 1/5 of total deaths, with just about 4.5% of the world’s population). Even if the rate stays at that level (which it won’t, since the new variant is still far from dominant), we’ll be over a million deaths in six months. And since vaccinations are increasing at a rate far below where they should be, it might well be six months before they start to have a significant impact on the rate at which people are dying.

Just as in the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in February, the administration’s inactions and deliberate misinformation have made this situation much worse than it had to be. We should have significantly ramped up genetic sequencing of virus samples to detect how and where the new variant had appeared – when we still had a chance of keeping it somewhat contained until vaccinations could be rolled out to contain it further. And we could have banned travel from the UK and South Africa. Even more importantly, there could have been a concerted effort from the White House to get people to wear masks all the time when around other people who aren’t household members.

Now the CDC admits it’s too late to contain the new variant, so we’re just going to have to prepare for the onslaught of deaths. Fortunately, we know what we need to do for that: order lots of refrigerator trucks and perhaps build more crematories. Who says we can’t rise to meet this challenge?

But consider the good side of this. It’s not as dire a situation as it was at the beginning of April. If deaths had kept increasing at the rate they were increasing then, the entire US population would have died before the middle of May. At least a good percentage of the US population will still be alive by the time vaccination can finally get us out of this crisis. That’s something Trump can put on his resume.

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 6.3%.

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.	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan.	105,687 (Note: This was 83,095 on 1/1)	3,409 This was 2,680 on 1/1	132%
Total 2020 & 2021	459,902	1,361

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 401,856 (was 356,561 on 1/1)

Deaths yesterday: 3,805

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 6.3% (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. It was 5.1% on 1/1).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 24,102,429  (was 20,445,654 on 1/1)

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 248,080

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 7.3%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 14,228,969

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 401,856

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 2.7%

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.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 11.9%

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.