Note
on May 5: I have finally realized – with the help of a couple friends who
pointed this out – that the email feed for this blog stopped working more than
a week ago. I think I know what the problem was, and I’ve implemented what I
hope will fix it. But in the meantime, you can always find these posts by going
to the blog link: https://thepandemicblog.blogspot.com/.
Please bookmark that link.
New deaths yesterday rose by 200, but
they’re still far below what seemed to be the trend just a week ago. However, since
I base my projections on the 3-day rate of change and that was down the previous
two days, my projections have fallen again since yesterday.
But the point is new deaths are still
rising – they need to be falling before we can say there’s really light at the
end of the tunnel. Even though we’re at “only” about 1400 deaths a day at the
moment, even if they stayed at that level this would be unacceptable. Two reasons
are:
- I don’t
believe the economy can really be restarted in any meaningful way until
new deaths are close to zero. As long as people think there is some
significant chance that they’ll be infected by the coronavirus when they go
to work, they’re not going to want to go. And forcing people to go to work
by cutting off their unemployment benefits is hardly the appropriate
solution! We need to fix the problem, period.
- Since people
over 60 (like me) make up the vast majority of Covid-19 deaths, if we don’t
make a serious effort to bring total deaths down, we’re telling them that
they’re expendable. I don’t really think that’s what people want.
But here’s by far the most serious
reason why we want to get this under control ASAP: Yesterday, New York health
officials said
15 children there had recently been hospitalized with a very serious syndrome
of unknown cause, which seems to be linked to Covid-19. Almost all of those
children had antibodies for Covid-19, indicating they are or were infected.
This is very serious: Almost all of those children required blood pressure
support, and five are on ventilators. Reports similar to this have been coming
out of Europe.
This seems to be a very serious result
of the coronavirus being so widespread in our population and Europe’s. As
everyone knows, very few children have died so far of Covid-19. Are we going to
risk significant child deaths soon – even though they might not be counted in
the Covid-19 totals – just because we didn’t want to be bothered to do what’s
necessary to stop the coronavirus?
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 6%.
Week ending
|
Deaths reported during week/month
|
Avg. deaths per day during week/month
|
Pct. Change from previous month
|
March 7
|
18
|
3
|
|
March 14
|
38
|
5
|
|
March 21
|
244
|
35
|
|
March 28
|
1,928
|
275
|
|
Month of March
|
4,058
|
131
|
|
April 4
|
6,225
|
889
|
|
April 11
|
12,126
|
1,732
|
|
April 18
|
18,434
|
2,633
|
|
April 25
|
15,251
|
2,179
|
|
Month of April
|
59,812
|
1,994
|
1,474%
|
May 2
|
13,183
|
1,883
|
|
May 9
|
10,075
|
1,439
|
|
May 16
|
11,753
|
1,679
|
|
May 23
|
14,154
|
2,022
|
|
May 30
|
15,450
|
2,207
|
|
Month of May
|
57,290
|
1,848
|
96%
|
June 6
|
18,022
|
2,575
|
|
June 13
|
21,705
|
3,101
|
|
June 20
|
23,692
|
3,385
|
|
June 27
|
27,637
|
3,948
|
|
Month of June
|
101,999
|
3,400
|
178%
|
Total March - June
|
223,158
|
|
|
Red = projected numbers
I. Total
deaths
Total US deaths as of yesterday: 69,925
Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,316 (vs. 1,161 yesterday)
Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 2% (vs. 2%
yesterday)
Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 6% (This number
is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 7% yesterday)
II. Total
reported cases
I no longer
pay any attention to the reported case number. It is a huge underestimate of
actual cases, which is probably 25-50 times reported. This is because of the
huge shortage of testing capacity. If reported cases were to be anywhere near
actual cases, we would need to be doing 20-30 million tests a week. I believe
the US has done about 6 million tests since the start of the pandemic.
Total US reported cases: 1,260,460
Increase in reported cases since previous day: 31,756
Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 3%
Percent increase in reported cases since 3 days previous: 9%
III. Reported case mortality rate so far in
the pandemic in the US:
Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 188,608
Total Deaths as of yesterday: 69,925
Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases
(=deaths + recoveries): 27% (vs. 28%
yesterday) Let’s
be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed
so far in the US, 27% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the
comparable number from South Korea, which is 3%. The main reason this number is
so high is that total recoveries are so low. I’ve been assuming since March 26,
when the recoveries number was first published, that it would rise, so that the
estimated case mortality rate (which was 41% on March 26), would be far lower
than it is now. If this number really stays at 27%, this means the actual case
mortality rate in the US is very high, comparable with say Italy.
No comments:
Post a Comment