Looking at travel data

On Wednesday, I was right to suspect that I would not get a chance to do a post; I ended up cooking for most of the day on the 24th. Anyway, now I’m feeling lazy so this post will be rather short.

I did look at some travel data and did do my usual nightly update of the virus data. Wednesday night data did not look good (cases deep in the 200K plus range and deaths above 3000 again). Numbers have dropped since Wednesday but that’s deceiving.

First, the travel data:

I did a graph where the top line is last year’s data and the bars below are this year’s data. I did this year’s data in bars because I wanted some bars to be in orange to represent the Thanksgiving and December related holidays. You can see that last year’s travel was definitely greater than this year. However, we did have some travel towards the end of the year where there were more than a million travelers passing through the TSA checkpoint, even though we are supposed to curtail our travel. I added an image of the table of numbers so that one can identify those million plus days.

On the 18th, 19th and 20th, we had the million plus days and those days represent the weekend, starting from Friday. The 23rd, which was Wednesday and the day before Christmas Eve, was also a million plus.

So doctors are expecting a surge after the New Years, even though they are desperate for some signs of hope. I don’t think we can depend on our fellow Americans: we are all undergoing a coronavirus fatigue and people just want something to cheer.

Here’s how we are looking as measured against the world:

Our case counts are still skyrocketing and it looks like our death slope is starting to noticeably get steeper. I did read an article today that some of those who did not believe in the virus are starting to acknowledge its existence. Unfortunately, that acknowledgment is coming at the expense of either themselves or their family members getting extremely sick and close to dying.

That’s too late. The coming tragedy is already baked in.