Dreadful milestone: 500K dead

A couple of days ago, the US reached a terrible milestone of 500,000 dead. Here’s Wednesday’s snapshot of data from 3 different sources: Wikipedia, Covid Tracking Project and the John Hopkins University. I made the image full width so you can see the numbers. The news uses the John Hopkins University data when telling their stories but I included all three so you can see how the different sources fare.

You can see that Wikipedia is probably underreporting the numbers and the missing numbers probably stem from the early days where people were trying to get their arms around the data gathering. Wikipedia is still okay by me from a trending and quickie update snapshot, as long as I’m not looking for exactitude.

In the middle is the Covid Tracking Project and it tracks pretty closely with the John Hopkins. I like using the Covid Tracking Project because they also track hospital and testing data and other types of data that I may one day look at. I can pull the latest data for the day probably by early evening. The updates from the John Hopkins do not come in until the next morning.

Now, I’ve been trying to compare the Covid-19 pandemic with the 1918 flu pandemic because whenever I would read stories that would have the 1918 flu as the basis for the storyline, maybe as a sample sitting in some vault somewhere to be avoided at all costs due to the contagious and deadly nature of that flu. At least that is how I would come away after reading those stories.

So, the 1918 flu is my benchmark.

According to the CDC, the flu lasted roughly 2 years: 1918 – 1919. Wikipedia has February 1918 to April 1920. The only data specific to the US that I could get was the total estimated death count of 675,000.

It sounds like 2 years with 675K death versus current one year at 500K dead. Granted, the population back then was much smaller: 1 billion versus today’s 7 or 8 billion. Still, in absolute terms, it is the covid-19 pandemic is nothing to sneeze at.

However, it looks like the world has recently started trending down:

The image on the left with the two line graphs shows the cumulative case counts and the cumulative death counts for the world in total. You can see that the cumulative case counts has been flattening out, and I may be dreaming it, but it appears to be just starting to flatten out for the cumulative death counts too. On the right hand side is a line graph showing the daily case counts for each of the major continents. US (pink) and Europe (orange) have been declining pretty dramatically but have lately started to flatten out instead of declining further. As a matter of fact, I’m sensing a tiny increase in the US.

By the way, we had a cold snap last week so that tiny increase in the US may be due to data catch up from last week.

Here are images showing the amazing trends for cases, deaths, hospitalization and positivity:

The declines are a beautiful site to see! I’ve been waiting and waiting for the lines to turn back up as if saying “fooled ya!”. I’m hesitant to celebrate because we have new variants out there circulating amongst us. I keep searching for signs of a surge but I’m not seeing it. As a matter of fact, UK and South Africa (but not Brazil) are also seeing declining cases.

A few weeks ago, we had the Superbowl played in Florida and doctors said that the cases could surge there, especially after seeing videos and photos of large number of people mingling without masks or any efforts at social distancing during and after the game. Here are two graphs related to Florida:

Unless Florida is hiding their data (and they’ve been accused of manipulating the data), I don’t see any signs of a surge due to the Superbowl.

Now doctors are warning about spring break. I’m hoping we’ve turned the corner; however, let’s all continue to wear masks and social distance until we get our population vaccinated. We’re not yet on the other side.

Discipline. Muster up that discipline.