It’s Going Down!

At least for now.

Quick aside: I’m trying to bring down my well of ideas; hence, I’ve been posting more than usual. I’m about almost empty and then I can begin anew trying to find ideas. Whew! This is exhausting.

I almost hesitate to say that the charts are definitely showing a downward movement for fear of jinxing the trend. I’m sure the news reporters have hesitated because it is only recently that I’ve seen the rare articles announcing the downward trend. Mostly, there is just not a lot of articles about skyrocketing cases and hospitalizations. My guess is that the reporters and the doctors do not want the general public to think “all is clear and we can go back to normal”.

We can’t go back to normal just yet because there are new, more contagious variants out there and we’ve got to get everybody inoculated. We’ve barely begun the vaccination so it is not safe yet. Besides, just because the case counts are going down, it is still being reported at a high level: we re currently skirting just north of 100K (rather than 250K).

As a reminder, deaths have a lag time of a couple of weeks, so it looks like that the death counts are flatlining rather than going down as the following California example shows:

Image 3: Deaths’ time lag

However, if hospitalizations and positivity rate continue to trend down, then we should start to see the death rate to subside.

By the way, that recent surge in death count in Image 2, especially in the Midwest, is due to an audit in Indiana. Apparently, that state is correcting its prior death counts.

For the most part, all regions of the US are seeing sustained downward trends, with the South being the notable laggard (of course, that is where most of the crazies are). Texas in particular appears to have their numbers whipping all over the place.

So, let’s look at the numbers by the month. The last bar in each image reflects February numbers so the averages for that month is still incomplete, but you can see in image 8 that January’s average case count (second bar to the right) is slightly less than December. January’s hospitalization is greater than December, but if all goes well in February, we should see the average to be less than January. Death is the only one seeing a rise in January and that is due to the time lag. I have no idea whether February’s death average will be less than January.

Even on the world stage, the trends seem to be brightening, if only because the US has such an outsized weight on the world’s numbers, not because we are large (we’re only 4% of the world’s population) but because of our exceptional handling of the crisis.

Image 11: World’s cumulative cases and deaths

You can see a slight decline in the slope of the cases – very so slight though. Maybe because Europe is still undergoing a ravaging from the new variants.

Here are the various continents and US:

All in all, that’s a bit of encouraging news. Hopefully, we are at the end of the dark winter that the doctors have been predicting. We need to continue to hold on to the masking, social distancing and staying home as much as possible, but it looks like brighter days are on its way.

Speaking of the variants – that’s the one thing that doctors fear most. The new variants could take hold of our communities before we can get everybody inoculated. That is the unknown and the big battle which is why we must continue to adhere to the doctors’ guidelines.

We’re almost there…just hold on.