The new usual suspects?

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The good news is that the rate of increase in new Covid-19 deaths in the US is still slightly declining, but the bad news is that still leaves us in the range of 900-1,000 deaths a day for the foreseeable future – since the lower rate of increase is offset by the increase in the base number itself. And new cases are still bumping around in the same 20-25,000 range that they’ve been in since early April.

What is changing is the state-by-state numbers. If you look at new deaths yesterday, you find California on top (which is a relatively new position for them), followed by the usual suspects: New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. But what about new cases? There we see a different set of actors altogether. California leads those numbers, too, but they’re followed by Texas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia in that order.

In other words, with the exception of California, none of the new case leaders are also new deaths leaders, and vice versa. The big question becomes: Will these new case leaders become new deaths leaders 2-3 weeks from now? Or is it possible that those states have figured out a way to effectively lower the case mortality rate, so that deaths aren’t anywhere near the level they were when New York and New Jersey were overwhelmed with cases more than a month ago?

It does seem that the coronavirus gets slowed down by sunlight and heat, but a caution there is that Arizona is probably the closest of these new case leaders to having an overwhelmed hospital system. While they certainly have a lot of sunlight and heat, they don’t have a lot of humidity, and that may be helping in states like Florida and Georgia.

But this also illustrates that all states need to be expanding their testing, contact tracing and isolation capabilities. A new wave in the fall could be devastating, since it’s pretty clear Americans aren’t going to go back into lockdown mode – yet in many states they’ll be less and less tempted to be outside in the fall. The only thing that can keep that wave from being much worse than the current one is if we can identify and isolate new cases quickly and trace and isolate their contacts. We certainly didn’t have that capability when we really needed it in March, April and early May, which is why we’re now in the position of having temporarily restrained the coronavirus, but by no means having defeated it.

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 the projected numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 5%.

Note that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4 weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks previous.

However, once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays - after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no significant intervening changes.

However, it’s 100% certain that deaths won’t stop at the end of June! They might decline some more this summer, but Drs. Redfield (CDC head) and Fauci both predict there will be a new wave of the virus in the fall, and one noted study said there was a good probability the fall wave would be greater than the one we’re in now, as happened in the 1918 pandemic.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
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 death every 44 seconds)	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	12,592	1,799
May 16	10,073	1,439
May 23	8,570	1,224
May 30	6,874	982
Month of May	42,327	1,365 (=1 death every 63 seconds)	71%
June 6	6,544	935
June 13	6,142	877
June 20	6,479	926
June 27	6,834	976
Month of June	27,773	926 (= 1 death every 93 seconds)	66%
Total March - June	133,970

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 115,140

Increase in deaths since previous day: 981 (vs. 1,053 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (this number was 1% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 5% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above – it was 6% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in deaths, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 2,066,611

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 20,627

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 9%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 808,551

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 115,140

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 12% (vs. 13% yesterday)

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.