As often happens, good news and bad news

The Worldometers numbers for yesterday contained both good and bad news. You may know that I track three reported numbers every day. The two I’ve discussed the most are total reported cases (which I now just report, nothing else – that number is such a small fraction of actual cases that it’s not worth paying much attention to anymore) and total deaths. Both of these numbers grew at their lowest daily rate since I’ve tracked them, and the 3-day growth rate of deaths (which is the only number I use to project total deaths into the future) was at its lowest value – 10% - since I started tracking deaths. See the paragraph in red below for further discussion of the deaths number.

However, the third reported number that I’ve been tracking since March 24 (the first day the data were available to track it) is the total number of recoveries – i.e. people who were sick with Covid-19, but are now recovered. This is a number we of course want to go up, not down. But yesterday, total recoveries only increased by 620 from the previous day’s number, which was 118,162, meaning this number only grew 1% yesterday.

How does this compare with previous days? I had never even calculated the 3-day percent change in recoveries until just now, but I now see it has been trending downward since March 29, the first day for which I could calculate this. On that day, it stood at 144%, and that was the highest value so far. The rate was 14% a week ago and 38% yesterday; it will very likely go lower the next two days, given that recoveries only increased 1% yesterday.

What this means is that an ever smaller and smaller number of people are recovering from Covid-19. And this is why the ratio of total deaths to total closed cases (which equals recoveries plus deaths) went up from 31% to 32% yesterday, after having posted its biggest decline so far the day before.  

But the big scandal isn’t the fact that recoveries went up yesterday, but that the ratio of deaths to closed cases is so high to start with – after all, even 31% (yesterday’s number) is terrible, since it means that of every 100 people who either recovered or died from Covid-19, 31 of them died. How does this number compare with other countries? Well, if you consider Italy and France to be good company, you’ll be comforted to know that they’re in our neighborhood – the ratio is currently 29% in Italy and 34% in France.

But if you happen to think we should be emulating South Korea, where the outbreak started at the same time as here (or perhaps even earlier), and where they decided early on that they simply couldn’t close their border with China – and who as of yesterday had 243 total Covid-19 deaths vs. 55,415 here – then you’ll be unhappy to learn that their ratio is 3%, meaning among every 100 South Koreans that have either recovered or died, only 3 died.

What’s driving this difference? I’m sure one big reason is the severe shortage of testing capacity in the US – and the fact that the federal government still denies this is really the case and still won’t take full responsibility for fixing the problems. Saying someone is virus-free requires two tests to be administered, and I can certainly understand why a hospital would be reluctant to use two of them on a person who seems to be doing fine. Better to just send them home and leave their case open.

Just another reason why having a lot more testing capacity – as well as the supplies necessary for it - is so crucial.

P.S.

Of course, if I’m right that the shortage of tests is behind the continuing high level of the ratio of deaths to total cases, then this will be solved when we have adequate tests, right? Yes it would, but now it seems that Dr. Susan Birx is waving the white flag on our ever having adequate tests available, at least tests that detect infections. She said yesterday that what’s needed is a “breakthrough” so that we have antigen tests for Covid-19, which would be a lot easier to administer and require fewer supplies.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it very comforting to hear that – three months into the pandemic in the US and at a time when the government’s own guidelines say that widespread availability of testing is crucial to reopening, yet reopening is clearly proceeding anyway – the person in charge of the whole recovery effort is now saying that it will take a small miracle for us to have the tests we need anytime soon.

Dr. Birx, please explain to me exactly why you are in this job, if your chief function now seems to be to deflect blame for anything bad that happens, since clearly a miracle won’t happen. We could hire a faith healer who would do that much more efficiently, and without giving Americans the illusion that at least one or two people at a high level in the government actually know what they’re doing.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 10%.

These numbers are much lower than yesterday’s, because of the continuing drop in the 3-day growth rate in total deaths. It certainly is good that total deaths from March through June will now only be about half a million, vs. a million yesterday. But consider:

1. Deaths in April will still be 1465% of deaths in March.
2. We’ll still have about 2,000 deaths per day in April. That number will be 3,600 in May and about  9,800 in June. I think all of these are appalling, and they’re not mitigated by the fact that the numbers are a lot lower than they were yesterday.
3. With the move toward more reopening, the country is indicating acceptance of the idea that we will never have the novel coronavirus under control, until there’s a vaccine available for all Americans (a minimum of two years, and perhaps much longer than that. It’s 40 years since AIDS appeared, and we still don’t have a vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes it). So new deaths will never reach zero, meaning that the deaths number of half a million shown below, for the first three months of the pandemic, is just a down payment on the total for the pandemic – if the pandemic can ever be said to have ended. And that looks more and more doubtful, given the current focus on reopening, come what may. 

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous week/month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5	111%
March 21	244	35	542%
March 28	1,928	275	690%
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889	223%
April 11	12,126	1,732	95%
April 18	18,434	2,633	52%
April 25	15,251	2,179	-17%
Month of April	59,462	1,982	1465%
May 2	13,146	1,878	-14%
May 9	17,815	2,545	36%
May 16	22,516	3,217	26%
May 23	26,101	3,729	16%
May 30	35,371	5,053	36%
Month of May	112,329	3,624	189%
June 6	44,704	6,386	26%
June 13	51,823	7,403	18%
June 20	70,227	10,032	36%
June 27	88,758	12,680	26%
Month of June	292,596	9,753	260%
Total March - June	468,444

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 55,415

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,150 (vs. 2,048 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 2% (vs. 4% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 10% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 14% yesterday)

II. Total reported cases

Total US confirmed cases: 987,322

Increase in cases since previous day: 26,426

Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 3%

Percent increase in cases since 3 days previous: 11%

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 118,781

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 55,415

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 32% (vs. 31% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 32% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is 3%. Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that they have fewer than 250 deaths, while we have over 55,000 deaths, as of April 27?