Delta Surge

Time to switch topics and take a look at where we are in regards to the coronavirus, and all signs point to a surge continuing to strengthen. Now the news in my inbox are starting to come in with stories about cases surging throughout the US.

The World

Europe and Asia are really surging right now, with the US just starting to rise from the floor. South America is finally flattening out, if not trending down, whereas Africa seems to have nipped its own surge. All of this data is sourced from Wikipedia, as noted in the “Sources of Data” box at the bottom of this post, and represents a snapshot as of 7/16/2021.

Image 1: Daily Moving Average by Continents

I usually like to start off first at the continent level and then I delve into the countries inside each of the continents to see which country is driving any surges.

To end this section on the entire world, I will put up a chart displaying the top 10 countries plus the US, top 10 in terms of moving average. Yep, the US no longer crack the top 10 – at least for 7/16/2021.

Image 6: Top 10 Countries by Daily Moving Average plus US

US

I’ll take a look at the US as a whole first and then I will delve into the regions.

You can see the upward trend in cases, hospitalization and positivity with positivity being the strongest, then cases, and finally hospitalization with it barely beginning to rise. There is a time lag between cases and hospitalization.

The other thing you can see is that the South (orange line) shows the strongest surges and the news has remarked on the cases rising in the South. The Northeast (dark blue line) is just flat, although the positivity line is just barely starting to rise.

The other thing to note is the snapshot date. The CDC data tends to lag behind Wikipedia or the John Hopkins University data, sometimes by a couple of days. The cases generally are about a day behind Wikipedia/JHU while hospitalization can be up to a week old; thus, in the images, the case count is as of 7/15/2021 (rather than 7/16/201) , hospitalization is 7/10/2021 and positivity 7/14/2021.

The reason why I sometimes like to use the CDC data, despite being a day behind, is because of states like Florida: Florida reports once a week now and it’s just a little harder for me to interpret trends properly. CDC apparently gets Florida’s daily numbers. Here’s are some graphics that strongly shows that difference:

On the left, image 10, is a graphic of data pulled from the CDC. The light blue bar (I have a red arrow pointing at it) represents Florida. You see that bar slowly growing everyday, so the surge is happening in Florida. On the right hand side, image 11, shows data culled from JHU and the bright medium blue bar that is found just on July 9th and on July 16th depicts Florida. Those are the days when JHU reports Florida’s numbers.

Did you catch that weird thing where my CDC case counts in the overall US graphic (image 7) was for 7/15/2021 but in image 10 it was for 7/16/2021? There is a timing involved when I run the Power BI updates – at a certain time in the day, the date will switch. I pull images that I think I will need for a post and then when I write, I think of new ideas requiring a different set of images. Sigh.

And finally, I notice our surges are beginning after our July 4th bash. I wonder if that celebration kicked off the surges?

Northeast

Now looking more closely at each region, I’ll start off with the Northeast.

Because the January and February time period had such a tremendous surge, the high peaks of those months are swamping June and July that I can’t see if any surges are occurring, so I will also do a set of graphics for the time period of the last 6 weeks.

Now we’re seeing possible surges across the Northeast. And the rise seems to begin after July 4th. New Jersey is weird – I’m not sure what is going on there. Hospitalizations are still flat except for maybe Delaware. See the value of truncating the time period to remove the January/February peaks?

Midwest

Again, kind of hard to see but Missouri and Oklahoma show the strongest suggestion of a surge followed by Kansas and Illinois. Let’s truncate to 6 weeks.

The picture becomes stronger – again, almost every Midwestern state has been seeing a rise in case counts in the last few days. Michigan has a worrisome surge, so I don’t know if that surge represents a data update or not. Usually a data update impacts one day only. While hospitalizations are generally flat, Nebraska is the exception.

West

I just realized that when I had to re-do my charts to use CDC data after the COVID tracking project stopped updating their data, I must have stopped in the middle of re-doing the West, so the hospitalization charts are no good. (Changing these charts are a little bit of a bear for me since I am learning how to use Power BI).

Anyway, before doing the 6 weeks truncation, Nevada showed the strongest case of a surge to me, and maybe Utah and Alaska. After truncating the time period, other states may be showing signs of case increases.

South

Lastly, we have the South:

A couple of states are starting to stick out like a sore thumb: Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and possibly Alabama. Arkansas and maybe Florida are starting to see increasing cases in hospitals.

Here are graphics with time period truncated to 6 weeks:

I had hoped we would avoid the summer surge but it does not look like that will be the case. Even the news media are saying the surges are beginning to take hold across most of the states.

This is going to be a long hot summer in so many ways.