Hints of an Upsurge?

While I’m still converting my data pull from the Covid Tracking Project to the CDC data, let’s take a look at where the US stands in regards to the pandemic. I have done enough to be able to start seeing trends – although yesterday I did run into a little problem.

Now, I admit it is kind of hard to tell if a slight uptick is a sign of a pending surge or just a temporary blip. The image on the left shows all regions showing a slight uptick but that could be a temporary stall before going down further. The image on the right shows all of the states for each of the four regions of the US.

By the way, the graphs are for March 19, 2021 and are from Wikipedia.

Let’s look at the second image a little more closely because it is kind of hard to see:

I marked out with little red tick marks next to the Midwest and Northeast states where I could see some breakout states starting to rise above the crowds. In the Midwest, I see Michigan (lavender) and maybe Illinois (yellow-orange) as starting to go up. In the Northeast, it looks like New Jersey (red) and Pennsylvania (kelly green) may be starting a surge. Everyone else looks kind of flat.

Now I’m going to drill down even further where I look at each of the individual states, first starting with the Southern and Western regions. These sets of images are from the CDC which at the time of printing out the images the date pulled for cases and deaths was March 18 and testing March 17. The CDC data will generally give a one day lag time – usually.

In the West, I circled two states that might be just barely beginning to go up; however, it is really faint so it is hard to say. In the South, I just can’t see anything suggesting a curve upward.

Next, let’s look at the Midwestern and Northeastern regions:

I would say Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey are definitely showing signs of rising cases. I circled others as being suggestive if one were to squint one’s eyes. Missouri has a one day data surge which feels more like an update of data related to the past – maybe like some old unreported data unearthed by an audit.

Those are the little troubling signs out there and in conjunction with the new more contagious variants, especially the British one, multiplying fairly rapidly, doctors are concerned about a new set of surges to break upon hospitals. Europe is currently undergoing their third surge and I can see it in the French and Italian data, although they don’t seem to report everyday. That lack of daily reporting kind of skews the graphs.

Brazil is still going up and up and up.

The race is on to see if we can vaccinate people faster than the virus can spread. The big problem is that about half of the male Republicans say they won’t go get vaccinated – the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers crew. (Although I’m under the impression that the anti-vaxxers are more of a lefty liberal thing.) And we have spring break going on right now.

We are so close and yet people are losing discipline.