The first COVID death in the US was on March 1. That was (counts) well, approximately 75 days ago. That’s a lot of days, and sometimes daily charts with a lot of days start to look frothy, and it’s hard to distinguish trend using one’s eyeballs.
The solution to that is to run the charts with either binning or moving averages. Here are some with 7-day moving averages.
The good news is that over the last 10 days or so, a downward trend in new cases per date clearly presents itself, DESPITE the fact that new cases was expected to trend UPWARDS due to increased testing in most parts of the US.
During March and most of April, for the most part, we were testing people only when they presented at the hospital, meaning we were only testing cases that were sick enough to need intervention. Obviously that group would have a higher mortality rate that those who were testing for other reasons (for example, I’m healthy, but I’ll be tested in a week or so because I’m due for a cancer screening in a hospital). But although we’re testing asymptomatic individuals now, the case rate continues to drop. This is good news, because it means that we don’t have as many asymptomatic carriers scurrying about as we thought we might.
And…..case counts are dropping despite states starting to “re-open”. I keep seeing articles about how this state or that has suddenly experienced a “flare-up”, and that may well be (considering how the NYC area drove the numbers during April) but it’s not being reflected as significant in the overall statistics. So, there could very well be a Florida flare-up that is more than offset by the drop in cases counts out of NYC.
How much was NYC (and area) driving the numbers? Substantially.
However, in better news:
The 7-day moving average clearly shows a downwards trend in the daily death rate. We’re still (depressingly) averaging 1500 deaths per day, but the worst appears to be past. Same caveats for case count mentioned above.
One more thing — — to correct an error from a prior post regarding per capital testing, here is the current data regarding testing per capita by state. Nice work, Tennessee.
Anyway, that’s it for today. Stay home if you can, but if you take proper precautions….don’t worry too much if you have to go out.
