Rounded the corner? Guess again!

Or maybe we have but not in the way the President wants you to think. We had peaked sometime in July and daily infection cases started to decline until the count reached around 40K per day or around there. But sometime in mid-September, the U.S. case count and hospitalization started to go back up. Yesterday, I had pulled up a case count that was the second highest for this year and earlier today, I read that we’ve surpassed our prior peak today. I’ll have to pull that new data later on tonight.

No, the pandemic is not getting better despite what the President wants you to believe. As a matter of fact, I read somewhere that a writer saw terrifying research data for the next 6 months. As I have said before, a new surge has begun and is driven by all regions of the US rather than just one.

So we’re in for a hell of a time.

And this time, it’s not just the metros but includes the rural areas – the areas that cannot have this virus rampaging through its hospitals, simply because the rurals don’t have a lot of resources and the rurals are predominantly populated by the elderly.

Last night, when I pulled the data, I noticed that worldwide the pandemic appears to be accelerating. I usually do a mental math to see how much has increased and last night was a big jump.

Here are some quick U.S. data, as of 10/22/2020:

In the upper left corner of the four images, you can see that the last time we peaked was around July 17th, 2020 at roughly 76.8K cases, and yesterday came in at 76.6K. So, yeah, we’ve basically reached the summer’s peak. Now, I’ve been saying that hospitalization has been going up but now I see that death counts are and positivity rate looks like they are starting to rise. I’ve circled in red what I’m seeing.

Here are some images breaking out the regions:

You can see that all regions are surging; the Midwest has caught up to the South and is looking a mess. By the way, it seems like that the snowstorm earlier this week is about two months early. Let’s repeat that, two months early. If that’s the case, then everybody is heading indoors much earlier than normal. And just before the final election day.

Finally, I’m going to highlight three states namely because one has been surging horrifically for quite some time and the other two states are specifically related to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally/Festival. As a matter of fact, some experts fear that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may be the seed for the current surge (in addition to students going back to colleges).

The charts for the Dakotas are related to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. I recently read a Washington Post article that started off about a guy planning to go to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally back in August. He was adamant about going. But then he ended up getting sick…really sick…to the point he thought he was going to die when he got hooked up to the “oxygen machine”. Of course, that was when he had an epiphany and thought that going to the rally maskless and no social distancing was stupid.

“…(He) now looks at things differently. Watching football, he worried how many of the thousands of fans admitted to a recent Kansas City Chiefs game might become infected, even as he noticed they sat apart. He once put on a mask to humor (his girlfriend); now he says he has to resist the urge to yell at strangers to wear them.”

“How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have spread the coronavirus across the Upper Midwest”, Washington Post, Brittany Shammas and Lena H. Sun, October 18, 2020.

““I was naive,” he said. “I was dumb, you know? I shouldn’t have went. I did; I can’t change that, so I just got to move forward. But sitting here just the past few days, that’s all I keep thinking about. I’m like, Jesus, look at the hell I’m going through, the hell I put everybody through. It ain’t worth it. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.””

Ibid.

I had to say it, but yeah, it was stupid. Why do people have to get sick to learn the hard way that we need to wear masks, avoid crowds and social distance as much as possible?

Finally there are some charts and data about Wisconsin only because they’ve been surging the worst for the past couple of weeks.

Now I’m done here and ready to pull the latest data which supposedly topped the one back in July. Oh, one last point, I read somewhere that doctors and researchers are dreading next week. Holy cow! Is it because hospitals are almost at capacity? Unless we Americans can pull together the discipline and emotional intelligence to wear masks and avoid social gatherings, the next six months (October through March) are going to be dreadful.