Every time Snowboarder_Bo posts new numbers … I wonder to myself “How long will it take for weekday COVID death figures to at least get down into the low triple digits – and stay there”?
I know Bo is not using Worldometers’ stats … but going by WM’s stats, 7-day average for U.S. deaths is, indeed, decreasing markedly. Just hard to see in the day-to-day numbers, I guess.
I do use WoM’s numbers.
Looking at WM’s U.S. ‘Daily Death’ graph (link above) and clicking on ‘Daily Deaths’ at the bottom shows 1,493 COVID deaths in the U.S. on November 10. Using the stats you’ve posted, there were 1,786 deaths on or about November 10th.
I’m sure it’s just a timing issue of some sort … perhaps dependent on when precisely you pull and post the data from WM. My initial assumption was that you were using another source like Johns Hopkins.
Had been decreasing. I use 91-divoc, but it looks like the worldometers numbers are similar. In the last week the death rate has stopped falling and flattened out, following the flattening of the previously-falling new case rate.
I twitch pretty badly when people talk about COVID in the past tense. “During COVID, such and such happened”. No people, this chart should make it blindingly obvious it’s not over, and as we move into holidays I fully expect the numbers to go back up as they did last year.
There may be an uptick over the winter but I’d be very surprised if the numbers behave just like they did last year in the USA. Even if there is that uptick mass vaccination, boosters, treatments and huge numbers of natural immunity from huge numbers of infections mean that things are unlikely to be anywhere near that severe.
Even in the hugely infectious delta wave deaths have been substantially lower than last winter’s peak and I wonder quite how much dry tinder is left.
Nearly 50 million official infections probably means far, far more actual infections (I’ve seen reasonable estimates that actual infections may be 5-15 times greater than official figures) and that alone confers a great deal of natural immunity and, to be rather crude, with most people already exposed those susceptible may no longer be part of the population this winter.
Of course a completely different strain may be an issue but that is not looking likely at the moment.
I hope you are right. But…
…
By the end of last week, the number of covid-19 patients in the [Larimer] county’s hospitals [Colorado] matched the peak in December 2020.…
Colorado’s setback is not an outlier on the national landscape. The late summer and early autumn easing of the nation’s burden of new coronavirus infections has come to a halt over the past two weeks, according to health department data analyzed by The Washington Post. Dramatic drops in caseloads in the Deep South, including the high-population states of Florida and Texas, have been offset by increases in the Mountain West and the northern tier of the country.
Twenty-three states have seen at least a 5 percent increase in cases over the past two weeks, with Illinois, Minnesota, and Vermont reporting 50 percent more cases on average. The aggregate national caseload, having eased for two months, begin ticking up after hitting a low of about 69,000 new cases a day in late October. On Wednesday, that average topped 76,000.
…
Certainly there will be local variations (e.g. where vaccination rates and previous exposure has been patchy) but as a nation I’d be pretty confident that even if the lines on the charts are similar in shape this winter, the amplitude will be far less.
252,651,684 total cases
5,095,673 dead
228,575,348 recovered
In the US:
47,693,516 total cases
780,775 dead
37,729,489 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
I hope you’re right, but in September we saw 65% of the numbers from last winter. It was the second-highest peak of new daily infections since the pandemic began. I have no confidence at all that we can’t hit those numbers again. Between waning immunity and reinfections, I expect the numbers to shoot back up any day.
I’m just not so sure that the virus has got the opportunity over this winter that it did either last winter or in September. I doubt it’ll have the capacity to kill as many people certainly. That figure, along with the hospitalisation rate are the figures that most concern me. Rather than simple numbers of infections which were most likely an unrepresentative estimate of the real figures in the past. The official figures for infections could be out by orders of magnitude but the same isn’t likely to be true of hospitalisation and deaths to the same degree.
Deaths in the US have been tracking the infection rate pretty closely since July 2020. The death rate in September 2021 was the third highest ever (just slightly behind the peak in April 2020).
On average, 1200 people have died in the US from COVID every day in the last week.
In my state, infection numbers are moderately high, but deaths are way down from where they were last year. I credit vaccines.
Metropolitan Detroit: Experts consider this fourth to be the fourth surge:
Hospitalizations are rising:
I can’t even conceive of how frontline health care workers must feel now.
In my area, infection rates are WAY up from last year. This immediate area was low infection rate all the way through the earlier stages of the pandemic, and then spiked into red for community transmission late summer 2021 and has sat there ever since.
I’m trying to make sense of some of these numbers, so can you be a bit more specific with what you mean by “infection rates”?
Do you mean positive test rate? Or cases/100k? I feel like both of these metrics are heavily influenced by how much testing is being done and who is being tested. But they are still probably the best we have.
I’ve been watching this map:
and from that page:
The color-coding is based on two metrics: the number of new cases per 100,000 residents and the percentage of coronavirus tests that come back positive in a seven-day period.
So it’s a combination of both.
In my case I’m referring to “New Confirmed COVID-19 Cases per Day” from 91-divoc.com
This number tracks pretty well with the “New Deaths” number, so if the rates are influenced by testing it’s probably a fairly consistent multiplier.
Testing rates tend to rise and fall with infection rates, which makes sense because the more people are getting sick the more people are going to get tested.
I’m also looking at rates published by the local sewage authority. They are noisy, but have the virtue of being unaffected by how many people choose to get tested, whether tests are available, etc.
Thanks folks.
I really wish there was some uniform way to measure these things, since my understanding is that some states (cough Florida cough) like to use non-standard metrics. They exclude previous positive tests in their “positive test rate” and don’t report cases on anybody that isn’t a permanent resident (not a small population in Florida).
Big picture it does appear we are starting to see a winter surge in many areas. Let’s see if vaccinating elementary-age children and getting boosters in at-risk folks helps put a dent in the community spread or if the large cohort of unvaccinated and Delta’s ability to spread even via vaccinated carriers overwhelms the defenses again.
This should surprise nobody: