New Year’s Day Surge!

I was going to do a post purely on hoping for a better year and what not. Not sure what I would have written about, but it would have steered away from the coronavirus. However, with the surge and the terrible weather at the end of the year, I feel like I need to briefly note these events.

A vertical wall of surge

The last few nights I’ve been disbelieving what I was seeing and going back to the original source of data to make sure my Power Query was pulling in the data correctly. The numbers are just EYE-POPPING.

When I first pull data, I start off with the world as a whole and delve into the continents and individual countries. After I get a brief overview of the world, I then head over to the US, the regions and then the states. Finally, I delve specifically into my state and hometown to see what is going on where I live.

In the early days, the daily change in the cumulative number would hover around 300,000. Later on, the daily count would drift up to around 600K and sometimes even up to 900K, but never did I see the counts broach 1 million until a couple of days ago – maybe on December 29th when the count broached 1.3 million. That was a Wednesday. On Thursday, it was 1.5 million. Yesterday it hit 2 million. I thought the count I was receiving might have been catch up due to the holidays, although I would normally expect that to occur on Mondays, not Wednesdays.

But no, in all of this time, up until Wednesday December 29, the daily count never went above 1 million.

Here is a graph of the continents’ surge and you will see the vertical aspect of the surge, especially with US and Europe. The orange line is the US, the pink is Europe – driven mainly by UK, France, Italy and Spain, and the purple is South America led by Argentina.

Note: all graphs for countries around the world comes from Wikipedia. See “Sources of Data” box at end of post.

Image 1: Continents

Here’s a graphic of the top 10 contries in the world in terms of cumulative cases over the last 14 days since December 31, 2021:

Image 2: Top 10 Countries in daily cases in last 14 days

I highlighted Canada and Argentina because I don’t think either of these countries have ever been in the top 10 list since the pandemic’s inception. Canada’s surge is so vertical that I’m surprised I haven’t read anything about Canada.

I highlighted the US’s, UK’s and France’s numbers because I don’t think those countries ever reached those levels of cases. The US might have been around 1.2 to 1.5 million for a while but not 2 million or 3. As a matter of fact, when I saw those numbers, I had to go back to the source of data to double check that my Excel was pulling in the right numbers. I was simply stunned at how rapidly the US went to 3 million – in just a matter of days. The week before Christmas, the daily count was around 1.6 million and then the week after it shot to 2 million before reaching 3 million in the last two days.

For the UK, the week before Christmas, its count hovered around 900K. After Christmas, the count breached 1 million daily count, and hasn’t gone down yet.

France broke the 1 million barrier on December 30, 2021.

I highlighted the sum total of 9.4 million because before Christmas that total was in the 4 to 5 million range.

Individual countries

The data for these charts come from Wikipedia.

USA

Before I go much further, I do want to point out that because of the vaccination, looking at cases alone may not be the right way of tracking the progress of the coronavirus. The vaccination appears to be decoupling the infection from hospitalization and deaths, so for the US, I want to pay more attention to the hospitalization because that would be an indicator of possible more deaths to come. I do want to see the cases only to test the decoupling assertion and I believe cases could be a forerunner to overwhelmed hospitals.

Data comes from the CDC.

You can see cases surging vertically as never before and in all regions of the US. Hospitalization has barely begun to rise, at least relatively to the cases, but I do expect the hospitalization to go up. If hospitalization starts to strain, I expect to see deaths to start rising. Right now, Deaths has stabilized at a somewhat high level

Northeast

Here, the Northeast is actually showing surging hospitalization and deaths, so it is understandable that the news has been highlighting the situation.

South

Cases are surging and some states are seeing rises in hospitalization, but deaths haven’t started going up dramatically. I expect the South to start overtaking the Northeast. Florida in particular is showing dramatic surges.

Midwest

The Midwest is kind of mixed. I see some dramatic surges, but hospitalization seems to be quiescent. The hospitalization is kind of at an elevated level, but it is not surging.

West

Finally, the West also seems mixed. Nothing stands out to my eye quite like the way the Northeast or South does.

That’s it for tonight. It is time for me to go gather today’s data, although being New Year’s Day, I don’t expect much data to have come in. We’re still in holiday mode.

Also, I’m going to look at the weather – tornadic weather is expected for the South tonight. I had wanted to talk about the weather that has been happening in December but I’m running out of time. Maybe tomorrow.