For this time of year, we’re doing very badly

As I pointed out last week, daily reported new cases are now a huge multiple of what they were a year ago at this time. Last week, they were eight times higher. And that’s an underestimate, since there are so many tests being conducted at home now, vs. very few a year ago. If the person never has to go to the hospital or the doctor, a mild or asymptomatic case will probably never be reported.

Granted the new variants are less deadly, but as we saw in January, the lower mortality rate can be overwhelmed by the number of cases. If we have this many new cases in the summer months, when people are less likely to be in indoor gatherings, we’ll probably be lulled into a false sense of well-being. This was the case last July 4, when Biden all but declared victory over the virus (and the CDC dropped mask requirements, which was criticized by many at the time and proved to be a mistake. Of course, they’re dropped now, but nobody has the heart to call for them to be put back in place, even though that would probably help a lot).

Unfortunately, we’re probably likely to repeat what happened last year: after a deceptively healthy summer, there will be another big wave in the fall, although this time with much higher case numbers and deaths back over a thousand per day. And just like last year, the deaths will probably be almost entirely among the unvaccinated. This will once again be a completely self-inflicted wound.

This chart shows where we stand vs. the other industrialized countries. If you look at who’s ahead of us – Russia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa – we’re not exactly in the best of company. But hey…We give people a lot more rights than other countries do…the right to kill schoolkids with an AR-15, the right to die because the person refuses to be vaccinated, the right for a woman to die during childbirth because she couldn’t get an abortion for a medical condition…What’s there not to like about all of this?

The numbers

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

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 2020

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May 2020

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June 2020

23,925

798

57%

Month of July 2020

26,649

860

111%

Month of August 2020

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept. 2020

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct. 2020

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov. 2020

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec. 2020

79,850

2,576

209%

Total 2020

354,215

1,154

 

Month of Jan. 2021

98,604

3,181

119%

Month of Feb. 2021

68,918

2,461

70%

Month of March 2021

37,945

1,224

55%

Month of April 2021

24,323

811

64%

Month of May 2021

19,843

661

82%

Month of June 2021

10,544

351

53%

Month of July 2021

8,833

287

84%

Month of August 2021

31,160

1,005

351%

Month of Sept. 2021

56,687

1,890

182%

Month of Oct. 2021

49,992

1,613

88%

Month of Nov. 2021

38,364

1,279

77%

Month of Dec. 2021

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%

Month of April 2022

13,297

443

42%

Month of May 2022

11,474

370

86%

Total Pandemic so far

1,036,204

1,264

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,036,204

Average daily deaths last seven days: 373

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 330

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 87,477,251

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 954,690 (136,484/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 798,829 (114,118/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.1% (0.9% last week)

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

Deaths and Recoveries

I’m not bothering with my usual Numbers section today, since the 1-day and 7-day rates of increase in deaths and cases haven’t changed at all, and the ratio of deaths to closed cases remains at 17%. The projected deaths numbers are close to what they were yesterday. I haven’t discussed the ratio of deaths to closed cases for a while, although I’ve been reporting it. To refresh your memory, this is the ratio of total Covid-19 deaths so far to “closed cases”; closed cases is the sum of deaths so far and “recoveries” so far. The fact that the US rate is 17% means that, of all closed cases so far in the pandemic, 17% of them have resulted in death. This is down substantially from the initial value of 41%, in late March, when Worldometers started reporting recoveries. But it is still quite high – it seems to mean that, if you’re determined to have a “case” of Covid-19, the odds are close to 1 in 5 that you will die. I’ve been periodically comparing the US performance in this ar...
Read more