New cases aren’t going up much yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen

There were some news stories this weekend, stating that new Covid cases had started increasing again. That’s true, but this doesn’t yet constitute a turnaround. Here are the average daily new cases for the first four weeks of February (ending on Sundays): 63,669, 54,373, 62,874 and 63,004. In other words, new cases jumped up two weeks ago, and in the past week they increased a little more. We’re now more or less back where we were at the beginning of the month.

But again, these numbers are far too high, period. We didn’t have 63,000 average daily new cases ever until last summer, and there was about a one-month period when they were mostly a little above that level. Then they went down as the second wave receded. As the third wave hit, they passed 63,000 last October 15, and never went below that again until two weeks ago. With daily deaths still over 1,000, we’re nowhere near finished with the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the UK variant is increasingly found in the US. The CDC said a couple months ago that it would be the dominant variant by now, and, since the amount of gene sequencing being done is still far too low to detect that, there’s no reason to believe this wasn’t an accurate prediction. That variant is behind the new waves hitting Europe now, although the fact that vaccinations are proceeding much more slowly there certainly doesn’t help that situation.

And the two countries that are the biggest concern now are Brazil, which is being absolutely devastated by the really aggressive variant that first appeared in Manaus at the end of last year (which may reinfect people who have already had Covid, although I don’t think there have been any tests of vaccine efficacy against it), and India. In that country, there was widespread belief that the virus had been beaten a few months ago, yet now India is third in the world in total cases, and new cases are increasing rapidly.

This just shows you can never let your guard down with this virus until you know every case, and you trace every contact the person had. The last time we could possibly have done that was last March, but hopefully we’ll get to that position at some point in say the next six months. This, combined with testing every new arrival in the US, would constitute true control of the coronavirus.

The numbers

These numbers are calculated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site.

Month	Deaths reported during month	Avg. deaths per day during period	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
Month of March 2020	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. 2021	98,064	3,163	123%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
March thru 3/28	34,748	1,030
Total Pandemic so far	562,526	1,431

 

I. Total deaths

Average deaths last seven days: 1,154

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 1.5%

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases as of yesterday: 30,962,803

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 441,029 (=63,004/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.4%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 23,410,884

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 562,526

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 2.3%

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 has been declining since a high of 41% at the end of March 2020.  

 

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