Wrapping up January

I hadn’t updated my spreadsheet numbers in two weeks, so I just did it. Total deaths for January were about 7,000 fewer than what I projected two weeks ago, based on the current growth rate in deaths, but January was still the worst month for deaths so far in the pandemic – almost 20,000 more than the previous record, set in December.

The growth rates in both cases and deaths have declined in the past two weeks, which is good. It would be nice if they continued to decline, but the wild card here is the three new variants from overseas, and especially the Brazilian one that decimated the city of Manaus. Manaus was reveling in a low number of cases and deaths in December, and one scientific study said they’d achieved herd immunity. And then the onslaught from the new variant came, aggravated (as in Ireland and the UK) by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

As these countries – and even Denmark – have shown us, this situation can turn around literally on a dime, due to these new variants. If you want to watch evolution on a fast scale, just watch one variant replace another that doesn’t spread as quickly – only to be replaced later by an even faster-spreading variant. Unfortunately, the US may have a front row view of that spectacle in a few months. Then we’ll look back to January and wonder where the good times went.

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 5.3%.

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.	98,064	3,163	123%
Total 2020 & 2021 so far	452,279	1,338

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 452,279 (was 356,561 on 1/1)

Deaths yesterday: 1,886

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 5.3% (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: 26,727,229  (was 20,445,654 on 1/1)

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 107,816

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 4.1%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 16,403,843

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 452,279

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. In January it was flat. That’s not good, but at least it didn’t go up, which might have been expected given higher hospitalizations.

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 8.1%

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.