Can you see the light at the end of the tunnel?

If you can’t see it, that’s because it will be a couple of more months, if not a year, before we start to see the coronavirus tamed.

A couple of factors for this dismal outlook:

1. We did a lot of traveling over the holidays despite warnings from health officials.

Here are the TSA travel numbers and the associated chart. It is kind of hard to see so I highlighted the area of chart in yellow to represent travel numbering over 1 million and I underscored the December dates in red at the lower right. (I also enlarged the graphic for better legibility.)

The yellow-orange bars represent the vacation and holidays for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. It is assumed that, in general, some people start taking time off from work and start traveling the Friday before the actual holiday. So, as an example, for the Thanksgiving holiday, some people may start their travels on Friday, November 20th, to take a week off. For Christmas, I assumed the week of vacation would begin Friday, December 18th. That seems to be a reasonable assumption since travels seem to perk up the Friday before the actual holiday itself.

The pink bars represent Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

The Graphic 2 clearly show that December had more 1 million plus travelers passing through the TSA checkpoints than at any other time of the year.

I hope these social gatherings were worth it because January and February are going to be dreadful.

2. Coming into December, hospitals were already straining due to onslaught of sick people.

Due to the travel situation, we are going to be experiencing a surge upon a surge that was already taking place in December. Consequently, the already constrained hospitals will have to start rationing care once they hit the point they can’t take on anymore people. Rationing care means people will die because there are no more beds, no more medical personnel or no more equipment to handle the onslaught.

Graphic 3 shows how the hospitalization numbers have been going up and up, with December seeing the highest levels seen all year. Since November the number of hospitalized patients have not gone down. Graphic 4 shows, somewhat, how hospital icu capacity is being constrained, although the graphic is kind of hard to read. The overall US line graph on the left in Graphic 4 shows a steady rise in the percentage of the icu beds being filled. The multiple line version on the right depicts the percentages icu beds used for each region of the US. The South definitely soars above all other regions while the West is well within the range of the Midwest and Northeast, despite California’s current troubles. That is kind of surprising to me.

3. We have two new strains of the coronavirus, both extremely transmissible, putting pressure on the hospital system.

The UK strain has already appeared in the US and is speculated to have been lurking in the US during the fall. This strain is highly transmissible and with all of the traveling Americans have been doing, I would not be surprised to start to see the virus spreading very wildly. I wonder if that is what is going on in California, although the medical doctors haven’t announced that the strain is prevalent there – only that they have seen a case or two. However, with the hospital system extremely pressed for capacity, this new strain could push the California system into collapse where people start dying much more frequently because they can’t get into the hospital for care.

That’s a dire scenario.

The South Africa strain is supposedly very transmissible, too, but has an additional concern: the current vaccines may not be as effective against this strain. If this strain becomes prevalent in the US and the vaccines do not work as well, we may be back at square one with the light at the end of the tunnel pushed further into the future. That whole idea is worrisome.

The South

The last brief comment I want to make before signing off tonight is that it feels like the South will be the next epicenter, after California. It kind of feels like Texas and Florida are leading the South in the more recent surges I’ve been seeing this week. Texas was already surging before the Christmas holidays and despite a holiday slowdown in reporting, the surges are still coming. Hospitalizations have gone up unabated so the dire circumstances cannot be far behind.

In both the Cases (Graphic 5) and Deaths (Graphic 6) charts, you can see the South (the orange line) rising above the other regions, especially in December.

These next set of graphics are kind of hard to see but the one on the left shows cases in the US regions. The South (orange) and West (pink) seemed to be one set and the Midwest (brighter blue) and Northeast (darker blue) seem to be another. The South and the West appear to be gyrating wildly at higher counts.

The graphic on the right (Graphic 8) is even more difficult to see because at this point of the pandemic, most states are running out of control but the South, West and Northeast do have a single state (or two) that stands out above the others. The South appears to be Texas and Florida vying for the top spot, the West has California and the Northeast has New York.