The horror! The horror!


If you look at the lines I highlighted in red below, you’ll see that things are getting worse very fast. I’d noted a temporary drop in the rate of increase in new cases last week and I wondered if that was a good sign. The answer was clearly no, and that’s most likely because of under-reporting of new cases in advance of the Labor Day weekend.

This week, there were reports of hospitals starting to ration care in Idaho, as well as ICUs being full in various Southern states. There was one newspaper story about a man with a heart condition in one of those states, who went to his local ICU because of heart problems. They had no room for him and had to contact 29 other hospitals before they found one – in another state – that could take him. He died before he could be treated. This is the price of the “freedom” that Govs. DeSantis and Abbott are so concerned about protecting, literally at any cost.

And speaking of the price of freedom, Kevin Perry sent me a great article on what you can expect will happen to you in a severe case of Covid (just in case you’ve decided to exercise your freedom not to get vaccinated, which I hope isn’t the case). The writer, a respiratory therapist in Arkansas, describes, very methodically, the seven stages you can expect, with the first stage being coming to the ER. The last stage is what another healthcare professional described to me as “celestial discharge”. The writer tells this story in a very detached voice (since she’s seen so many of these cases that ended this way), but it couldn’t be any louder if she screamed it.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, September 12.

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%

Month of August

31,160

1,005

351%

Total Pandemic so far

679,564

1,196

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 679,564

Average deaths last seven days: 1,906  

Average deaths previous seven days: 1,485

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 2.0%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 43,036,777

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 1,231,518 (= 175,931/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 978,193 (= 139,742/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 3.0%  

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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