A week later from Thanksgiving, 2020

I read today that the hospital collapse has begun. That means that the death rate should start rising precipitously fairly soon.

Last night, as I pulled data, I was seeing record numbers and I don’t believe we are yet at the point where Thanksgiving gatherings are appearing – that’s about another week for the Thanksgiving related cases to start showing up.

Here are the cases, deaths and hospitalizations that I pulled for 12/3/2020:

The charts for the overall US will probably be off around November 25 – December 1st time period due to the Thanksgiving holidays. Hospitalizations did not suffer because doctors and nurses have to continue to save lives, holiday or no holiday, but case counts and death counts will suffer because of time off for the holidays but should see a bounce back up if the surges are really still continuing, and I think that is what I’m seeing.

At the overall US level, you can see the dip in case infection counts at the end: Thanksgiving occurred on November 26th and that is where the big dip in the numbers occurred. Death counts also suffered the same dip, but hospitalizations…not so much.

When you look at the regions, you can see the Midwest showing a huge downturn in daily cases. The peak occurred around November 18th, so about a week before Thanksgiving. The way I look at the Midwest is that downturn is more due to efforts to curtail the community spread through more stringent mask and social gathering guidelines. The Midwest death counts continued to rise until it peaked November 25th, just before Thanksgiving, and then started to rise again in December. Meanwhile, Midwest hospitalizations started to flatten around November 25th. That flattening might be due to no more hospital capacity.

The other regions show a tiny dip in the case numbers and death counts around November 26 and then went right back to trending upward in December. The holiday time offs impacted the data collection and reporting. Hospitalization is another matter: all regions (except the Midwest) show a continuing rise in hospitalization.

Here’s the positivity rate which has been trending up lately:

Last night here are some numbers that practically jumped out at me. I highlighted the record numbers in yellow: note that December already has record numbers for cases, death and hospitalization. Yesterday, the Covid tracking project showed over 200K in cases, the first time it ever reported that (John Hopkins reported over 200K a day earlier). It looks like we have now reached a daily 2K in deaths in December, which I think translates to 2 people dying every minute. Expect 3K soon as we are at around 2700. December also sees a breaching of 100K level of hospitalizations. And the positivity rate has been rising throughout.

It looks like we are still running at a million new cases each week which was pretty much par for the course in November and why November had over 4 million cases. Since July we’ve been between 1 million to just under 2 million.

What’s really shocking is that in just 3 days in December, we’re already at over half a million and that’s before the data from the Thanksgiving gathering starts to kick in.

So, yes, it’s looking ugly.

Now to look at the world. The two charts on the left below are my usual graphs for the world’s cumulative (not the daily count) cases and deaths for each day. To me the rate of increase of cumulative cases look like to have been increasing since October 23, which I sort of mapped out in the first chart on the right. I’m showing the slopes for July to September time period versus the slope since October 23rd.

In addition, in the second chart on the right, I tried to break out the make up of the daily case counts by continent to try to determine with continent is driving the increases in infection. I thought it would be the US but no, it looks like Europe and then Asia is driving that trend.

Here are charts for cases and deaths for the top 10 countries in the world (top in cumulative totals). I circled in red US rise in cases to point out that the slope is getting steeper in November. These charts represent daily cumulative, not the daily count for the day. The cumulative deaths on the right does not jump out at me although I’m thinking that the slope of increase looks like it is getting steeper.

And then finally, just to compare the continents, I’m showing the moving average for cases. You can Europe has dramatically decreased its daily count but US and Asia is increasing. During September, it was India suffering the surge but now in November it is Iran.

Okay, time to end this post and pull in the next set of data for today.