Death – still here, on his pale horse

It was nice to see that the big jump in new deaths last week last week didn’t hold up this week. Now we’re back down to “only” 655 deaths a day. On the other hand, new cases have stayed at almost exactly the same level for the past few weeks: 32,000. This doesn’t seem to indicate the virus is on its way out. The fact that we’ve passed the one million total pandemic deaths number obviously doesn’t mean that the virus is going to start packing its bags to make its exit, now that it’s achieved its goal of killing one million people.

However, it helps to compare the current time to the early pandemic. One of my most-read posts was this one on March 28, 2020. I had just started writing these pandemic posts two weeks earlier. I had earlier been concentrating on the growth in new cases, which of course was exponential but still laughably small compared to what we’ve experienced since then (18,000 new cases a day vs. over a million on a few days during the delta wave last summer. And there had only been 1700 deaths the day I wrote that post, while now we’re over a million).

Yet I was really concerned about deaths, since my projections (not based on science, just arithmetic) showed them going through the roof very quickly – unless we had a complete lockdown, like in Wuhan. As it turns out, we had a kinda sorta lockdown that mitigated some of the problem, but the US never got over the terrible start we had. As a result, we have the highest recorded deaths in the world, and one of the highest per capita death rates.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, April 4.

Month

Deaths reported during month/year

Avg. deaths per day during month/year

Deaths as percentage of previous month/year

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%

Month of Sept.

56,687

1,890

182%

Month of Oct.

49,992

1,613

88%

Month of Nov.

38,364

1,279

77%

Month of Dec.

41,452

1,337

108%

Total 2021

492,756

1,350

158%

Month of Jan. 2022

65,855

2,124

159%

Month of Feb. 2022

63,451

2,266

96%

Month of March 2022

31,427

1,014

50%

Total Pandemic so far

1,007,704

1,344

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,008,924

Average daily deaths last seven days: 655

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 915

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.5%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 81,874,532

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 229,110 (32,730/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 235,321 (33,617/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3% (0.3% last week)

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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