If Covid is going away, why are new cases 14 times higher than a year ago?

I pride myself in being able to look at numbers and (sometimes) discern near-term trends. However, I must admit that I never realized how different the Covid picture is now than it was a year ago (and it’s been very different since last December, when Omicron and its hugely effective variants started to take hold). Specifically, just 10 minutes ago, I had a “Holy s___!” moment when I saw that the level of weekly new Covid cases is around 14 times what it was a year ago at this time. There were 63,464 new Covid cases in the seven days ending August 7, 2021 and there were 903,380 cases in the seven days ending last Sunday.

However, as we all know, that probably understates the difference, since at this time last year, there was very little home testing going on, whereas now that’s the preferred method. Almost none of the positive cases identified at home get reported (in Illinois, there isn’t even any way for someone to do that), but there must be a huge number.

It’s safe to assume that the same doesn’t apply to deaths: All Covid deaths are probably reported as such nowadays - even though in the early days of the pandemic in New York City, many deaths weren’t reported as due to Covid, since the person wasn’t even transported to the hospital (estimates of the deaths that had been missed were later added back into the Covid numbers). The EMTs had to perform triage on the spot, since the ERs were full. There was no point in taking someone to the hospital if they were likely to die in the next few hours and take up a perfectly good ER bed (since there was also a shortage of refrigerator trucks to house the dead, because there was a shortage of crematoria to cremate them. Nowadays, we’re horrified by shortages of chips).

And new deaths, while they’re going up now, are still at a little lower level than they were a year ago. They were at 1,022 a day one year ago, while they were at 596/day in the week ending Sunday. However, deaths went below 800 a week a few weeks later last year and oscillated up and down before settling into the 1,000-2,000/day range in the fall. But they went back up to 3,000 a day in later December and January, as Omicron started working its magic.

I don’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen this fall, but anybody who thinks we’re looking at Covid in the rearview mirror should remember the warning on those mirrors: Objects are closer than they appear.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, August 7.

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%

Month of June 2022

11,109

370

97%

Month of July 2022

11,903

384

107%

Total Pandemic so far

1,059,659

1,229

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,059,659

Average daily deaths last seven days: 596

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 499

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: 94,100,380             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 908,380 (129,769/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 997,108 (142,444/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.0% (1.1% 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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