Covid deaths continued to fall last month, but they’ve already turned back up


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There’s no question that daily new cases have jumped significantly, especially in the past week. We were at 73,000 average new cases a day for the seven days ending Sunday. We went through a five or six week period when that number was 10-20,000 each week. But it jumped to 54,000 the week before last.

Not coincidentally, we had a similar jump in July of last year. Daily new cases had been in the 20-40,000 range in June, but they jumped up to 60-70,000 in July (and didn’t go above that until the third wave started to hit last October). That, by the way, was the second wave. This is pretty depressing, since it means we’re getting similar spread of the virus now, with half the population vaccinated.

Deaths, until last week, had continued to fall – which is why the July deaths number is so much lower than June’s. However, in the past week, average daily deaths jumped from 262 to 353. And with case numbers jumping so much (and the great majority of those cases being in unvaccinated people), it’s inevitable deaths will be going higher in the coming weeks.

Of course, this is due in large part to the Delta variant being much more transmissible. But the fact that this could have been avoided if vaccinations had been much higher makes this whole situation really depressing.

And for a great view of the front lines of the war, read this article on burnout among health care workers in Arkansas – sent to me by Kevin Perry. The big difference between this situation and the first and second waves? It’s that the healthcare workers were considered heroes then. Now they’re considered villains by a large portion of the population in some states, because they have to tell so many people that they can’t “cure” them – or even save their lives – since they didn’t get vaccinated when they could have been. How’d you like to have arguments about that all day, at the same time you’re working your a__ off to save those same people’s lives?

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, August 1.

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

98,604

3,181

119%

Month of Feb.

68,918

2,461

70%

Month of March

37,945

1,224

55%

Month of April

24,323

811

64%

Month of May

19,843

661

82%

Month of June

10,544

351

53%

Month of July

8,833

287

84%

Total Pandemic so far

629,316

1,196

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of last Sunday: 629,830

Average deaths last seven days: 353

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.4%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 35,768,924

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 517,471 (= 73,924/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.5%  

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

 

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