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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