Some updates before the storm

Hi, before I get hit with some bad, bad weather coming my way, I thought I would do a little update on the coronavirus to “keep busy” during these anxiety producing times. Right now, I’m just sick in the stomach.

Topic 1: 200K Milestone and year end projection

First off, the U.S. just recently hit the 200K deaths milestone. The image in the header actually has 200,000 dots but you can’t see them because I had to make the image so small to contain all of the dots. That faint blackish background behind the words “Milestone 200K deaths” is actually composed of 200K dots. So many deaths and more projected to come.

The first death looks like it was March 5 and the 100K count was around May 26. That was a quick upshoot from March to May. Then it took roughly 4 months to get to the second 100K (June to September). It is projected that by the end of the year – in 3 more months – we’ll hit another 200K to make a grand total of 400K deaths before starting 2021.

Topic 2: Latest Power BI Graphs

Lately, the US had been seeing declining number of cases which I was initially skeptical of because the decline seemed to happen fairly soon after Trump made his wish known to decrease the number of testing. The hospitalization, though, did decline alongside the cases so the reduction in the daily number of cases reported may actually be real.

In addition, there are some stuff going on around the world that is interesting. First of all, India’s number of cases appear to be increasing at a faster rate than any other country in the world, nearing to a straight upward climb. The data comes from Wikipedia and was pulled for 9/19/2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territor/strong>.

What’s going on in India? Why are they having such a steep surging slope? I have no idea why because I seem to recall that early on in the year, their “president” Modi called for a lockdown which was implemented very severely such that it created chaos for those very poor workers. Did the lockdown rules loosen? I really haven’t kept up with them but it is troubling how rapidly the case infections are spreading. Even though the country has a growing middle class, they still have extreme poverty there – at least that is my impression.

Here’s a table showing the top ten countries in terms of total number of cases thus far. US, with 4% of the world’s population, constitutes roughly 22% of the cases and 21% of the deaths. That’s exceptionalism for you.

I wish the anti-maskers would get real instead of living in fantasy. But…it looks like as the virus starts reaching those living in rural areas or remote places, people are starting to awaken and say, “it’s not a hoax”. Slowly, a few – not all – are starting to wear masks and social distance. I wish it didn’t have to take a prolonged stay in the ICU or a death to move these people. There are still a few that still don’t care about their fellow American citizens, even if they have caught the virus, know somebody in the hospital or know of somebody who died.

The next graphic shows the US versus Europe where during the summer US surged way above the level Europe experienced early in the year. Europe had managed to bring down their daily cases to a much lower daily level – less than 10K a day. The US surged up to 60K – 70K – 80K levels in the summer, all mostly from the South. But sometime during the summer, Europe has opened up their businesses and lightened the rules regulating health measures, so their cases are now going back up. It looks like Europe is experiencing a second wave and is almost back to the peak level of winter.

Meanwhile you can see that US daily cases started to decline sometime in August, but wait, there’s an upsurge at the end in September. That’s probably due to the Midwest surges. We’re heading into the fall and we’re seeing a tiny uptick. I don’t know if that is a real uptick or a false bump. If it is a real uptick, we are starting from a high base point rather than a near zero basepoint because the South has not successfully wrestled the coronavirus infection rate down to an acceptable level.

And finally, here’s a table of the top ten European countries suffering upsurges, with Spain and France leading the way. Their daily cases are definitely higher than the US and I don’t know why I haven’t heard much about these surges. We’re going into fall/winter season so this second wave has the potential to be worse than the first wave, which was already pretty bad. It was painful to read about what was going on during the winter, especially in the hospitals that were being overrun by sick cases.

Now very quickly here are some graphics pulled from another Wikipedia page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_data/United_States_medical_cases

You can see the uptick in cases and maybe even in deaths (I may be reading too much into that). Hospitalization has been going down (and I hope that is correct despite hospitals now being required to report their data to HHS, which seems to be more political, rather than through the CDC), while testing has bumped along up and down. In a few weeks, we’ll see if that recent uptick turns into a surge with accompanying rise in hospitalizations and deaths.

This next graphic shows the Midwest’s line coming close to the South’s line. Both the South and the West’s daily cases has declined but not enough for the fall/winter feared 2nd wave.

And lastly, here we cycle through the individual regions to see which state is currently surging. In the Midwest, the standouts are Wisconsin, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota. And maybe even Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Minnesota. Heck, all of them. In the West, Utah really stands out but so does Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Arizona has dampened their surging cases from over the summer but do I see a tiny upsurge at the end? And finally, the South, it is hard to pick out the standouts but I would say Tennessee, South Carolina and West Virginia. Texas, Georgia and Florida seem to have dampened the infection rate.

Okay, I’m ready to close out this post and go curl in a ball. This upcoming week stands to be horrible. I’ll see if I successfully get past this week and can log back in next weekend, or maybe I’ll be so stressed out that I have to do a post just to do something. I’m just not looking forward to this week’s projected weather from Tropical Storm Beta. I used to not have to worry about tropical storms, but this one is moving slowly, so it is going to dump rain for hours. Not a good sign. I’m just sick in the stomach.

I can’t believe people are still denying that something is wrong with the climate.