Goodbye 2020

We’ve finally reached the end of this momentous year. I’ve seen a lot of images with the “goodbye 2020” sentiment this year – and very little, or maybe no Happy New Year. Saying “Happy New Year” seems wrong since we still have a raging pandemic that is supposed to get worse in January, as if December was not already bad with hospitals running out of capacity.

Here’s hospitalizations – it’s been racking up records every day now:

Using cases and death data for the Christmas/New Year period is deceiving since there is a slow down in reporting the numbers or in doing testing. My state alone did not report numbers during December 25 to 27, so the numbers dipped but we can’t rely on that dip to be the good news.

California has been in the news a lot lately because southern California is basically at 100% capacity. Based upon some data through December 18th, California’s icu section looks to be 75% filled. Here’s some numerical data – I’m enlarging this so you can see the numbers:

And here’s the map of California. Its outline is very faint but this is what I get from the tool in Power BI – again I’m enlarging for better legibility:

I imagine other states in the South, West and Northeast are approaching the same capacity issues but at this time, this particular mapping tool in Power BI really doesn’t show the US as a whole very well when using the zip codes – there are large areas that are left “blank”. Here’s a version when I call up the icu bed used percentage on a statewide level rather than zip code level – the darker the red, the more filled the icu beds are:

So, looking at that map, the entire state of California is actually doing better than Nevada, Texas, or Oklahoma. Rather, it is southern California that is experiencing the hurt.

And then finally, travel data:

In the chart, the upper zig zag line is the travel data for 2019 so you can see that 2020’s travel is significantly less. The orange bars signify the holiday periods for Thanksgiving and Christmas which includes the weekend before the specific days and the few days after. The fuchsia/pink bars denote Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas day. The numbers and the chart indicate that American citizens have been travelling more in December – there were more days with over 1 million travelers passing through TSA checkpoint – despite the surging pandemic.

And now we face the prospect of a new and more highly contagious variant ripping through the US, after a period of lots of holiday travels and social gatherings and during fully loaded hospitals. That new variant has been percolating silently in our communities and now California and Colorado has just announced their first sightings of the new variant. These cases were those who did not travel. This fact means there are others out there.

Yes, saying “Happy New Year” feels wrong with the raging pandemic, the new highly contagious variant of the virus, and the continuing flouting of the health suggestions to avoid travel or social gatherings.

January is apt to be worse than December. Let’s just look at the data for December:

December had the most cases (over 6 million out of the total 19.5 million) and the most deaths (almost 74K out of the total of over 330K). January is going to be worse.

Yeah, so on that note: Happy New Year!