Please, don’t get together for Thanksgiving

We’re deep into the third surge and it looks like the case infections are accelerating. This week we hovered around 150 to 170K in daily infection rate and deaths have been above 1000 per day which kind of roughly translates to a person dying somewhere in the US every minute.

Think about that…every minute, a person died somewhere in the US.

Here’s last week’s set of data points:

US versus the World

Let’s first look at the world’s daily cumulative: in the last month, the cases have been increasing at an accelerating rate. The graphic below on the left hand side shows the daily cumulative of cases (not the daily count of new cases). I’ve added some colored lines to depict as best as I could the slope of parts of the curve. The slope for November is steeper than the slope for August through September/October. The graphic on the right hand side shows the daily cumulative of deaths. In that graphic I don’t really see the acceleration of deaths.

Now here are some comparisons of US versus various continents.

The far left graphic shows the daily 7-day moving average of the case infection count for each of the major continents. The US is the hot pink line and you can see it go up and up. The orange line is Europe and that continent was on a steep upward climb in October and has just recently braked the climb to bring it back into descent.

The middle graphic shows cumulative case counts by country (not by continent); the green line is the US. I’ve added some additional lines to attempt to portray the slope of the acceleration of case counts: the US shows the steepest slope.

And lastly, the far right graphic depicts the cumulative death count by country just to show that so far I do not see an acceleration of deaths, although the US does look like it might start to surge right at the end of the green line.

Focus on US

So those are the graphics of US versus the rest of the world. Now here are some of my usual charts for the US: daily case count, daily death count, daily hospitalization and positivity. You can see that all statistics are rising steeply, driven mainly by the Midwest, but all areas of the US are facing the surge. It’s no longer just one region of the US.

The bright blue line is the Midwest. For the positivity chart, I circled the end because it looks like the positivity rate is flattening out now, instead of rising.

And finally, here’s a series showing case counts, hospitalization and deaths for each region and state.

Daily Case Count

As you can see, just about every state with the exception of Hawaii in the Western region is showing a surge in November. The Midwestern states and some Northeastern states are showing a particularly steep surge. We’re just in the throes of this.

Hospitalization

The hospitalization surges are more mixed. I would say that the West and the Midwest are showing the steepest rises in hospitalizations (again with the exception of Hawaii in the West). The South and the Northeast are more mixed, with some states showing rises and some states just barely beginning to go up.

Still, hospitalizations are definitely rising. My understanding is that the Midwest and the West hospitals are at capacity and are facing resource constraints. There has been quite a bit of news about doctors and nurses burning out and just stressed out from all of the rising cases of the corona. Those kind of conditions should mean rising death rates.

The hospital situation is not going to get better soon, especially with everybody travelling for Thanksgiving.

These hospitalization data are from the Covid Tracking project.

Death Count

I would say the death is even more mixed but when you look at the overall US, deaths are definitely increasing. The Midwest and parts of the West are the ones facing the most apparent death increases and I believe those surges stem from the fact that hospitals are now at capacity. The hospitals are just being overrun.

I suspect that next week, the week of Thanksgiving, will be even worse and then the really dire situation will occur in the weeks after Thanksgiving. With people travelling, the South and Northeast could begin to see hospitals at capacity.

So, about Thanksgiving

Given our precarious situation, you would think that we would try to avoid getting together for Thanksgiving and use our supposed American ingenuity to do the holidays differently. The latest news about how we are catching the virus is that it is no longer about large indoor crowds – now it’s the small intimate gatherings that are the vector for the spread. The reason for this change, in my mind, is that the virus is now way more prevalent in our communities such that our chances of meeting up with somebody positive with the virus and asymptomatic has increased. Positivity rates are now tracking higher than it was back in the summer (spring is an outlier in that the testing protocols were not set up properly – due to a shortage of testing supplies, we were just testing those who were suspected of having the virus rather than trying to test as many people as possible).

Getting together in small groups now stand a much higher chance of having a person with the virus.

Also, in the latest news, about 40% of Americans polled say they will be getting together for Thanksgiving in groups larger than 10 people.

All of this is to say I fear that after Thanksgiving, we will most likely see things get worse, with hospitals being severely overwhelmed. By Christmas, we could be having hospitals calling up families and setting them up to talk to their loved ones over Zoom for the last time.

It’s going to be a really bad Christmas.