The numbers tell an interesting story

I confess that I haven’t had much time to work on this blog lately, mainly because the consulting business which keeps me and my wife (and at least a few of her family members in Vietnam) alive has kept me very busy – and also because there has been a lot going on in the field of cybersecurity for the electric power industry, the subject of my other blog.

However, I updated the numbers just now for the first time this month, and noticed some interesting things:

·        In a few days, we’ll pass the dismal milestone of 500,00 reported Covid deaths in the US due to the pandemic (and undoubtedly many more non-Covid deaths caused by the pandemic).

·        The number of daily new cases has fallen, as has been widely reported in the press. In fact we’re now back to around 100,000 new cases a day, after being up to about 300,000 on at least a few days in the last 6 weeks.

·        However, that needs to be kept in perspective: It was only at the beginning of November that the US started to exceed 100,000 new cases per day on a regular basis. In fact, up until then I only found one day when we’d exceeded that number, and that was a real outlier. In late September, I remember being horrified when new cases started exceeding 50,000 on a regular basis.

·        Meanwhile, deaths are currently in a holding pattern, not going down in absolute terms. Yes, the 7-day rate of increase in deaths (which has been the main number I’ve looked at) is down to 4.6%, after being over 6% some days even a few weeks ago. But as with all rates of increase in the pandemic, you always have to keep in mind that, because the base number has been growing so rapidly, the rate of increase itself needs to continually decrease just to keep you at the same position.

·        And that’s exactly what’s happening now. I just tracked the 7-day average of daily deaths going back to early March (I can’t believe I never did that before, since the deaths numbers follow a weekly cycle due to much lower reporting over the weekends). I remember that in late March, I was predicting we’d be at over 3,000 daily deaths – i.e. a 9/11 every day – by the end of March. And we would have been, had not widespread lockdowns been implemented (of course, if daily deaths had kept increasing at the rate they were in late March, when they were close to doubling every day, the entire US population would have died of Covid by early May).

·        However, until January 8, the 7-day average of deaths had never been over 3,000. But from then until February 8, it never went under 3,000. And today it’s back over 3,000.

·        Of course, one hopes that with daily new cases having fallen so much lately, deaths will ultimately follow. And that’s undoubtedly true, were it not for the new variants that are wreaking havoc in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, and are already spreading in the US (the CDC says the UK variant will be the dominant variant in the US by late March, which is quite remarkable since it was only first detected in the UK in September and didn’t displace the “normal” variant there until December). Note 2/14: Kevin Perry just reminded me that there was a lot of maskless partying going on during and after the Super Bowl a week ago. That's another reason why cases may not continue falling, and might start increasing. Remember, the fall wave was fed to a large degree by the Sturgis (SD) motorcycle rally in the summer.

         One more note about the deaths number. The ratio of Covid deaths to recoveries, which has been falling from late March when it was at a horrifying 40% (meaning 40% of all coronavirus cases – not even just hospitalizations – resulted in death), seems to have leveled off at around 2.7% since the beginning of the year. This means that the great advances in treatment, as well as lessening of hospital overcrowding, seem to have leveled off as well – no surprise, since almost the entire focus of the federal coronavirus effort since last summer has been on getting vaccines out the door as quickly as possible (although the Trump administration seemed to have missed the point that the vaccines don’t do any good unless they get injected into people. They left this little detail to the “Hunger Games” system that prevails in many areas now – literally, survival of those most willing/able to devote huge amounts of time to finding a place to get vaccinated. Fortunately, we’re now making good progress on that front as well).

·        The fact that this ratio has leveled off doesn’t bode well if (when?) the case numbers spike up again because of the new variants.

To sum it up, the outlook is rosy as long as:

1.      You don’t look more than say a month into the future, when the new variants will start to loudly make their presence known, and

2.      You only look at new cases, not deaths. Of course, as the Texas Lt. Governor said early in the pandemic, “There are more important things than living.” Talk about looking at the bright side! If we all took that attitude, we’d feel much 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).

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.	98,064	3,163	123%

 

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 492,521

Average deaths last seven days: 3,102

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 4.6%

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 28,006,416

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 100,218

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 2.5%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 18,040,312

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 492,521

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. Until the beginning of January, it was steadily declining since a high of 41% at the end of March. Since then it’s been flat.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 6.1%

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.