Positive news on coronavirus – 3/4/2022
We’re in another period of high stress, so to counter it, I will just briefly write about the latest coronavirus status that I’m pulling from the data. The pandemic’s direction beginning to feel positive, although I don’t feel comfortable yet at the levels, but it is plunging in the direction that I like.
World Status
First, let’s look at the REALLY good news on how the US stands with the rest of the world. I mean, I haven’t seen this in a looonnnggg time – maybe since the pandemic began.
From a cumulative standpoint, no, we don’t look great but that’s water under the bridge. From a daily count standpoint, we have dropped from being number one in the world to eight. I’m going to have to do some fancy work, but I think we’ve been in number 1 position since early 2020, almost the beginning.
That is HUGE.
US Indicators
The indicators such as the case counts and the positivity are plunging – for all regions of the US. Hospitalization and deaths are following too but I will just show images for cases and positivity.
Our case counts have dropped to below 100,000 which I haven’t seen in a long time so it’s nice to see it drop below the 100K threshold. It currently looks like the case counts are hovering in the 50K range whereas the medical professionals – at least at one point – suggested that they would feel more comfortable at below 10K. I don’t know how they feel today, as I’m sure most people are tired of constantly watching out for the virus. I don’t know if the 50K will be our new permanent threshold.
At least our positivity has dropped below 5%, although, I suspect that validity of that number depends on the number of people reporting their test results. We might not have true numbers.
But did we ever have the real numbers? This might be as good as it gets.
No Other Scary Variants on the Horizon
There is a second variant of Omicron, but no one is talking as much about it so that variant may not be as scary. The rest of the world’s cases, except in some areas in Asia (South Korea and Vietnam), are also dropping dramatically.
So, let’s cross our fingers that the summer does not bring on new rising cases because we now have other problems to deal with.
Sources of Data
WORLD : Cases and deaths from Wikipedia website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory
US and STATES : Five main sources of data are available – Wikipedia, COVID Tracking Project, CDC, JHU, and HHS
Wikipedia: Wikipedia has broken out their tables into four links, separating out the cases from deaths and separating out the years.
New Cases 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_data/United_States_medical_cases
New Cases 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_cases_in_2020
New Deaths 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_deaths
New Deaths 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_deaths_in_2020
COVID Tracking Project: The COVID Tracking Project was a collaborative effort of free labor overseen by The Atlantic. This project ended on 3/7/2021. The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project was provided under Common Creative license “CC BY-NC-4.0” and covered cases, deaths, hospitalization, and positivity, amongst other data.
API: https://covidtracking.com/api/v1/states/daily.csv
Table: daily
CDC: CDC has become a replacement for the COVID Tracking Project for me although the data will often come in a few days later. Hospitalization comes in a week later. I’m tracking cases, deaths, hospitalization, and positivity.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Response. COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Data Access, Summary, and Limitations
Table: rows
API:
Cases and deaths: https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/9mfq-cb36/rows.csv
Hospitalization: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/g62h-syeh/rows.csv (Good data doesn’t start until about 7/15/2020)
Testing: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/j8mb-icvb/rows.csv
Positivity: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/j8mb-icvb/rows.csv
John Hopkins University (JHU): I rarely show these sets of data; I mostly use Wikipedia or CDC but sometimes I like to reference the JHU.
Please cite our Lancet Article for any use of this data in a publication (link)
Provided by Johns Hopkins University
Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE):
https://systems.jhu.edu/
Terms of Use:
1. This data set is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) by the Johns Hopkins University on behalf of its Center for Systems Science in Engineering. Copyright Johns Hopkins University 2020.
2. Attribute the data as the “COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University” or “JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data” for short, and the
url: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19.
3. For publications that use the data, please cite the following publication: “Dong E, Du H, Gardner L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. Lancet Inf Dis. 20(5):533-534. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1”
Website https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
HHS: Hospitalization data for US – can be US level, state level or county level
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