Latest Update: A Surge Appears to Be On Its Way

It’s been a while so it is time for an update on the coronavirus. The US has quietly been undergoing a tiny surge, nothing like back in January or February with the first Omicron, but there is a surge going on in the Northeast and Midwest.

Note on sources of data: For graphics concerning continents or countries around the world, the source is Wikipedia. For graphics covering the US and the regions, the source is the CDC. See for further information at end of post.

In image 1, I circled where the cumulative cases are starting to go up rather than remain on that flattened curve – a sign of a surging rise of cases. I also pointed an arrow next to the US in the table. We used to be at the bottom of the table, if not completely off of the table, but now we are back at the number 1 place – another sign of surging cases. Completely understandable since everything has opened back up, companies are demanding their employees come back to the office, mask mandates have gone away, and Americans are going about their lives as normal.

In image 2, while all of the other continents are going down, US is going up. (Yes, US is not a continent – I just like to look at US alone.)

If those graphics weren’t convincing that we look like we are going to have a surge, maybe these images devoted to the US will do the trick.

Where are the surges occurring? To me, it looks like most of the Northeast and some of the Midwest.

Side Note: I had some problems working with the PDF output from Power BI, so everything is either off to one side or smaller than usual. My machine has been undergoing some kind of updates so I’m hoping in the near future, everything will correct itself and settle down into some kind of working fashion.

My own hometown is probably about to go through a surge. The decline in cases has bottomed out and appears to be on its way up again.

The news said earlier that the Northeast probably should bring back out the masking rules for indoors, so it looks like we will be back to some kind of masking or safety kind of precautions, especially for those with vulnerabilities.

Also, North Korea is having a scary surge. Supposedly – I say supposedly because I’m having a hard time believing the North Koreans – North Korea was able to seclude itself from the world and had no coronavirus during the last two years. The leadership also refused to accept the vaccines from the rest of the world, so the population is totally unvaccinated.

And now North Korea is undergoing a surge from the Omicron virus, the most contagious version. Not good. Not good. The people are unvaccinated, their health is already compromised through starvation and malnutrition, and their medical infrastructure is bad. These combination of factors sounds like North Korea is about to undergo a disaster. I hope their leadership accepts any medical help from the outside world because the news sounds like it is going to be bad there. For the first time ever, North Korea is showing up in my Wikipedia data (and I presume also in the John Hopkins University data).