I’m dreading this summer (and fall)

Okay, we’re back to these surges but this time they are scarier because the surges are coming so much more quickly.

The data in these graphics come from Wikipedia on 8/4/2021. The graphic on the left shows a red arrow pointing to a numerical table depicting the U.S. back at the top of the top 10 countries. Over the last 14 days, U.S. incurred almost one million cases; last night, the data I pulled showed we hit one million. The same graphic on the right shows where I circled the U.S. surge. Our daily moving average towers above all other countries in the world, even India and Indonesia. Only a month ago, we were hovering around the bottom of the list at around 200K cases over 14 days: that’s how transmissible the virus is. (The colors for each country are the same for 7/8 and 8/4. That doesn’t always happen that way.)

Image 3: Top 10 cases in last 14 days, 7/8/2021

Here’s another view but based upon cumulative counts, not daily cases:

Image 4: Cumulative Count for Top 10 Countries, 8/4/2021

I circled the upward kick in the U.S. line, representing out escalating cases of the virus. From what I can tell, no other countries are facing similar change in slope. We’re going from flattened curve to now an upward curve.

All of these aforementioned graphics come from Wikipedia where I’m trying to pull information about countries around the world. At the end of this post, I have a Source of Data box with the links to the sources of data.

[A little side note here: WordPress reusable blocks are not easy to use. They keep getting corrupted and thus become empty the next time I try to use them. They are not re-usable if the information keeps getting deleted. What a pain…I have to re-do this crap. I hope WordPress fixes this. End of rant.]

US/Region Graphics:

Here are some graphics that shows the state of U.S. and the regions. You will see that the South regions are really surging.

So we can see that the cases have passed the highest levels of last summer and driving into the levels of what we saw during the winter. The South is leading the way; the cases are really much higher than any other regions.

Again, hospitalization and positivity are going up with the South leading the way.

Region/States Graphics:

The next few graphics will be just to show how each of the regions are faring so we can see which states are leading in the surge.

Northeast

Midwest

West

South

The entire South appears to be “burning” up with the COVID. Outside of the South, the only notable that is NOT being mentioned in the news is Hawaii. Florida is close to or has already surpassed its highest moving average of cases and its hospitalization level is about to breach the highest level. In regards to Florida, that state is reporting data only on a weekly basis if I look at Wikipedia or JHU, but the CDC has that data broken out on a daily basis. Here is where I prefer the CDC because it is easier for me to make comparison with other states when I have daily data.

Speaking of daily data, I noticed that quite a few states are slacking off during the weekend so Monday will see a bump in the numbers. If the media says that the Monday levels are the highest seen since “xxx”, be aware that may be because of data being brought up to date for the weekend. The jump in levels is false.

I think this summer’s surge could head up to the levels seen in the fall/winter, at least in the South. The fall/winter could be worse, especially if the governors keep disallowing mask/distancing mandates or don’t encourage vaccination. I don’t think masks work 100% but I’m sure the masks reduce the risks for the healthier people.

By the way, children are not yet vaccinated and are filling up hospitals, so we know that the current variant is making children very sick, unlike last year. Now we have school starting very soon, and yet some governors are not allowing schools to impose mask mandates. I don’t know the reasoning behind this but it seems to me crazy. Masks are such a simple thing; we could make a game out of being superheroes to make it palatable. Children are pretty adaptable.

Unless we get lucky and the surge suddenly drops, a la UK. The UK had a mysterious drop in cases and no one has explained that drop, even though UK dropped all restrictions. Dropping restrictions in the midst of a surge and then seeing a drop in the numbers does not make sense. But there you go.