Northeast: canary in the coal mine?

For the most part, the US is very quiet with the exception of the Northeast. It looks like cases are rising in the Northeast, with a concomitant increase in hospitalizations. I’ve circled where I thought I saw a very slight curve upward in the moving average. The chart of the regions on the right of Image 1 kind of shows an upward curve to the Northeast region.

Hospitalizations are showing signs of increasing in the Northeast region:

I don’t know if you can tell, but the dark blue curve found in the regional chart on the right is sloping upward at the end. The dark blue curve is the Northeast, so hospital occupancy is starting to rise there.

Last is the positivity trends which is pointing up; however, positivity is dependent on testing and I’m leery of the testing numbers. Now that people can test at home, people may not be reporting the results of their test so positive results may be undercounted. It’s hard for me to know how to read the positivity results. Right now, it is pointing upward but the numbers are mostly likely too low; meaning, the spread of the virus is probably well on its way.

By the way, all of the aforementioned charts are derived from the CDC numbers.

Reporting Lag

One thing I’m noting as I look at the numbers, I am seeing signs that people of getting tired of reporting. Last night, I saw that Wikipedia did not update their data and that in the past two weeks, they’ve been reporting almost every other day. Here are some charts from the CDC at the state level where you can see some states reporting maybe once a week:

South

In the South, you can see Florida is rising. A couple of states have holes in the bar graph – those are days when the data was not reported in.

West

In the West, you can see quite a few states reporting only once a week. Since these are lightly populated states, that might be okay.

Midwest

Again, you can see some states not reporting as frequently. Also, we see some incipient signs of rising cases in the last week or so.

Northeast

In the Northeast, you can see rising cases in New York, and well, pretty much the entirety of the Northeast region. Here are the charts for the hospitals:

I circled where I thought I saw a rise in the moving average line. I did not see such pronounced rise in the charts of the other regions’ hospitals, so the Northeast is the troubling canary (maybe). We’ll see how the next month go.

So, this is where we stand: everything quiet except for slight signs coming out of the Northeast. Data says that the variant driving the Northeast is the Omicron BA2 – the most infectious one. Now, we just have to see if that infectious rate is also more lethal.