A look at where we are in regards to Coronavirus – 6/27/2021

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about the pandemic but I have still kept up with the nightly data review in case the Delta variant starts to rip through the US. Although the news say that the Delta variant may be the dominant in the US, I haven’t seen any signs of pending surge. We seem to be hovering around the 10K threshold, i.e., we’ve bottomed out and case counts are no longer decreasing.

For today’s discussion, most of the graphics are based upon Wikipedia data, dated 6/27/2021. See below this post for more information on sources of data.

Around the world though, I’m seeing worrying signs of upticks. I don’t know if those increases are due to the Delta variant or due to people just getting tired of social distancing and wearing masks.

Image 1: By continents

Asia has declined tremendously, namely due to the improving situation in India’s urban areas (not sure about the rural areas because those areas don’t really have the hospital infrastructure to track such things – at least from my readings of the news), but I see a bottoming out and a tiny uptick in recent days due to Russia and Indonesia.

South America seems to be continuing its inexorable climb. Brazil’s situation does not seem to be improving, even though they have been hit hard by the pandemic. Most countries, when they are hit hard by the pandemic, they eventually tackle it and the counts start to decline. In Brazil, that never happened; the counts just keep rising.

Europe has bottomed out but when digging deeper, you can see UK’s scary rise due to the Delta variant. The US doctors say we are about a month or two behind UK so they fear that in about a month or so, we’ll start to see rises across the US.

So US has bottomed out for the time being but we still need to keep an eye on the testing data throughout the US.

Finally, Africa is seeing a worrying surge with the culprit being South Africa first Zambia second, and Tunisia right on the heels of Zambia the last few days.

The images below breaks out each continent for a closer look at the driver of surges, if there are any.

Finally, here’s a top 10 countries in the world by cumulative counts over the last 14 days:

Image 6: Top 10 by cumulative cases over the last 14 days

One thing to note is that India has slipped to second place in terms of cumulative counts over the last 14 days. Brazil is now in first place while the US had dropped to 10th place. Previously, we have been stuck in first place for quite a while so it is good to see that our case counts have been dropping. Out of Europe, only UK is on the list and that kind of shows how Delta is infecting the country.

Breaking out the US, we have the four regions and the south shows a strange surge. That “surge” is due to Florida reporting only once a week and I think that is distorting the picture. It’s actually hard to tell if Florida is surging or it is doing its usual thing. California has recently seen some upticks in count which can barely been seen in the West region where I circled it. Missouri used to pop up over in the Midwest and the news was talking about a surge going on in parts of Missouri.

Image 7: The four regions’ case counts

The next series of images are individual state graphs that I usually look at to see if anything looks like a pending uptick. Florida again looks funny but other states look like the case counts have really dropped.

Because the January/February period of this year saw such a huge rise in case counts for the US, I’m going to look at just the last 5 weeks because the January/February levels may be swamping out any signs of incipient surges. When I do that, Missouri and California starts to come into the picture. Florida is, as usual, being its weird self.

Image 12: The four regions’ case counts over the last 5 weeks

Again, here’s the individual states’ graphics but only over the last 5 weeks. You can really see that Florida is reporting only once a week.

In the Midwest, you can see Missouri and Oklahoma looking like a slight increase in counts have occurred over the last 5 weeks, so one of the states dovetails with what I’m reading in the news. In the Northeast, I’m watching Connecticut. In the South, it looks like Alabama and Arkansas bear watching. As for the West, Nevada, California and maybe Utah seem to be showing signs of increasing counts.

Looking at the last 5 weeks seem to help discern any worrying signs of increases. I need to try a version where I start from March and see if the images work better.

At present, everything appears quiet with just a few worrying signs.

Now if I can say the same about the weather, I would be much happier. We are now in hurricane, fire and heat season and the worrying has already begun.