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Peak Fall Covid?
I’ve been keeping track of some Covid-19 metrics. I’m particularly interested in the percent of new tests that are positive (%+) and the change in the number of hospitalizations. Those metrics indicate that the fall surge of Covid that’s been brewing up since late September might be topping out. The following graphs are based on data from the Covid tracking project. The calculations and graphs (and any errors) are my own.
The red line in the graph below is a seven-day moving average of %+ over the past 60 days. It appears to be forming a top and rolling over. The last three daily data points ( not the moving average) have actually been going down very slightly.
This is being mirrored by the seven-day moving average of the change in hospitalizations. Again, it appears that the recent surge might be topping out.
Let’s hope this continues. Fingers crossed.
Could you repost those graphs and choose full size instead of thumbnail so that they are readable? That would be great! @ekosj
As requested … I think … trying to do this on my phone
I hope this proves to be the case, but it seems that this virus, like the flu, peaks differently depending on the weather in a particular place. I’m on Cape Cod where we had almost no cases in my town throughout the entire summer and early fall. Now the number of cases is rising noticeably. That’s just people who have some symptoms getting tested. Since 90 percent of the PCR tests are picking up just the DNA from dead virus cells, it is also possible that the positive tests are not indicative of active contagious infections.
I don’t think we’ll know whether a second wave has materialized until well into January. Once it gets started in an area that goes into the 40 to 55 degree temperature range and 50 percent humidity range, it seems to go up for a few weeks consistently until the weather warms up and humidity rises. It’s very much like the flu that way, although the temperature and humidity bands are slightly different.
I am hoping for widespread use of HCQ and Regeneron and other treatments that have proven effective, and I’m hoping vulnerable people will stay out of the virus’s path. I hope the instant tests will allow nursing homes and hospitals to keep people with active infections out to protect the most vulnerable people. The death toll should be much lower than it was last winter and spring.
The numbers of ICU cases is still rising. I’ve been following that number carefully. We won’t see the peak until that number is trending down. It’s a predictor of future deaths.
Never mind. The graphic size has already been addressed.
Sorry.
Indeed. My thinking is that the ICU cases, like deaths, is a lagging metric. When ICU cases come down(please God let that be soon) that’ll be confirmation (I hope)
Fingers crossed
Where are you following that number? Seems to me there was a site where I was following it months ago, but I seem to have lost track of that one.
It’s available at the Covid tracking project
Thanks. I see that I had that bookmarked, but had been neglecting it. The “historical data” links for Michigan show the data in reasonable tabular form.
Worldmeter has it as “Serious Critical”
There was an article in our local newspaper where one of our physicians said that of ALL the cases of COVID that have occurred SINCE February, a full ONE THIRD of them have been diagnosed in the past TWO weeks.
Here, we’re starting to see school buses with one or two students on them (where they would normally carry twenty or thirty). Also, panic buying is starting to kick upwards again. Bare shelves for the usual; toilet paper, wipes, some food staples such as SPAM, etc.
Ekosj, I would love to see someone with your analytical abilities participating in the COVID 19 group.
Also your being there and participating would increase your understanding of the psy op now being perpetuated against the American people.
Consider this one fact: the current fatality rate of COVID 19 stands at 0.021%. (For math impaired folks who were not ever really taught ratios, percentages or fraction, this is 21 people die of COVID out of every 10,000 COVID cases.)
In mid-March, the public was told that the entire reason for treating COVID as the most serious public health menace since the flu pandemic that coincided with the end of the First World War. We were told this pandemic would cause 34 deaths out of every 1000 cases.
It is time we end this charade. Already the stats on American suicides are overshadowing the fatality rate of COVID.
Here in California, in Placer County, for instance, some three times as many members of the public have killed themselves as have died of COIVD. The average age of COVID fatalities is over 70 years of age. The average of those who kill themselves is now 40 years of age.
Statisticians report that currently one out of four HS aged young people have considered suicide in the last six months. Usually that figure stands at one out of ten HS aged young people.
With 19,000 businesses being shuttered just in California over the last 6 months, some to never re-open, with a capture of 40% of the economy by the top 1 percent due to edicts against small business, with the public being treated with the same regard by American “health authorities” as were the “vermin-encrusted Jewish population” of the German Third Reich, it is time to say “Enough.”
Thanks for the analysis.
Looking at the global covid data demonstrates two further facts:
Yes, but the statistic does not consider what is ha[ppening.
Eveery single person who is admitted to a hospital is now tested for COVID. Due to the faultiness of the test, and the overwhelmingly faultiness of so many false positives, this means many who are patients with other conditions are considered COVID positive and COVID patients. Once they die of their auto accident injuries, the hospital personnel are manipualted by the administration into placing cause of death “With COVID” on the death certificates.
A friend of mine on FB was stabbed recently. She then needed to be hospitalized. She tested positive for COVID. (The test being performed as her damaged lung was being drained.) She was immediately moved into a COVID positive ward. She protested this, as she did not have a single symptom.
She then was doped up on oxycontin and fentanyl. Throughout this ordeal, she remained on the cell phone,keeping in close contact with her FB followers.
The hospital personnel insisted she be ventilated. Her friends on FB slammed her with their pleas of “Do not let them do this to you.” She resisted being put on a vent.
Only after her FB buddies slammed the hospital admins with their phone calls emails and texts did hospital personnel begin to leave her alone with regards to “the absolute need for you to be on a ventilator.”
The question was answered later in the thread. I should have read the entire thing before posting. Sorry about that.
But what kinds of cases? That’s the question that’s important in my opinion – what kind of cases are showing up? Asymptomatic ones? Mild cases where the person thought they simply had a cold or seasonal allergies? More serious ones where the person is feeling pretty badly but doesn’t need to go to the hospital? Ones that require hospitalization? What kinds of cases are being picked up?
Panic buying for toilet paper and paper towels is starting to pick up around here too (just outside of Dallas). I’ve stocked up a bit more than I usually would.
For hospitalization I can give you a picture of the current situation here in AZ and Maricopa County (Phoenix) versus the summer surge we had. Hospitalizations (including ICU), ED visits etc are all up as is symptomatic surveillance data. However, the curve is not nearly as step as this summer and levels of daily hospitalization, ventilator use etc are running 40-50% of the July peak so there is some room for optimism this surge will not be as bad as in the summer.
The stats on COVID would be more believable if right now there were any statistics at all for Americans getting the normal flu.
As others have commented, COVID seems to be the cure for regular old seasonal flu, as well as pneumonia and cancer deaths, deaths by heart attack and even deaths by car accident.
Unless every other country in the world is getting it wrong, there is nothing unusual in how the US is counting. The same people who correctly use the data in point #1 above to point out that media and Democrat attempts to claim the US is the worst in the world in handling covid are grossly in error, refuse to recognize the same data undercuts their increasingly frantic claims that the US is overcounting deaths.
Case numbers appear to have a 30 day rhythm. About 2-3 weeks to peak and 2-3 after in the spring-summer waves and again now. We are peaking almost everywhere about now which suggests that deaths will peak 7-10 days after. The fatality rate is nothing like the first wave which is a blessing.
I wonder if the bug has changed, treatment is vastly better or we just ran out of the most exposed, most vulnerable people but the lethality is nothing like April in NY anymore anywhere except in hapless Belgium.
Don’t know of any evidence the bug has changed but think the last two factors you mentioned are playing a role, as well as testing more and finding more “minor” cases which also improves the fatality rate.
Because the same mitigation steps used for COVID also reduce the spread of the flu- in the Southern Hemisphere they had a very mild flu season b/c of the existence of masks, social distancing, and enhanced hygiene (the flu season in the Southern Hemisphere is “our” summer).
I don’t consider whether the US is over, under or properly counting the COVID fatalities in terms of its numbers by looking to the counting done by other countries. Not at all.
You conflate my examining of case numbers, and case fatalities with my examinations of the differences in treatment and then outcomes between the US and its lack of using available remedies with the stats from nations that use those remedies. Those are 2 separate things.
What I have tried to do is point out that HCQ protocols would be the way to go.
With New York’s own Dr Zev’s COVID protocols being published in full in October 2020, just two weeks after our beloved CDC banned any ability of doctors to prescribe HCQ protocols unless and until the patient is hospitalized and on supplemental oxygen, these protocols can not be some type of a secret.
It is beyond belief that our health agencies are not considering what every single independent, credentialed and non-sold out individuals including Cahill, Dr Zev, the Bakersfield doctors and America’s Frontline doctors have attempted to explain: that as it is essential to avoid the cytokine cascade of effects which occur on the fifth day after COVID symptoms manifest themselves, then patients Absolutely must be treated with HCQ protocols early on, prior to day 5, for those protocols to work.
Of course it is equally possible that the Oct 9th ban on treating COVID patients until they are in hospital and on oxygen is being stipulated so that any possibility of having a successful treatment of COVID thru HCQ would then be prevented.
Of course all these real immunologists, virologists and doctors find their interviews and videos on the “censored list” of FB, youtube and twitter.
The Latin American curves were distinctly similar and softer than Europe and the NE US. Saying that that was the result of policy intervention is like saying DeSantis must have had better policies than Cuomo because his state had a COVID experience similar to the rest of the southern US. Saying that any of that was the result of policy intervention rather that COVID’s very distinctive regional patterns is unfounded.
Pretty sure you’ve misplaced the decimal point.
Your arguments are internally inconsistent. You avoid international data when it conflicts with your preconceived notions, but embrace it when it fits. I remember the Frontline Doctors nonsense from this summer and the astonishingly dishonest chart they used, which was posted several times here on Ricochet, purporting to show the difference in fatality rates between countries that used HCQ and those that didn’t.
You’ve also argued here the fatality rate for covid is a miniscule 0.021% (less than the flu) to emphasize this is no big deal, so what’s the difference whether HCQ is being used or not?
OurWorldInData.org shows the current case fatality rate for the U.S. as 2.1%. That’s 210 people out of every 10000 cases. That’s slightly better than the rate for the world as a whole (2.4%) or the EU (2.3%). The EU rate was a lot worse until recently.
DeSantis DID have better policies. He initially had the same order that nursing homes take back COVID patients-BUT after ONE WEEK he rescinded the policy. Cuomo on the other hand, refusing to admit he was wrong, kept the same policy-which led to thousands of unneeded deaths.
He did not repeat Cuomo’s gross error but the overall COVID outcome in both states was not driven or lessened by any policy interventions.
Sorry to be late and asking a “dumb” question. I’ve never been tested and won’t, where do I fit in the Covd positive or fatality stats?