Will there be a fall surge?

Note: The graphics have a lot of white empty space, so they look terrible but I’m just trying to get this blog out.

I haven’t done this kind of blog in a while, largely because the data is kind of hard to read and all signs point to decreasing cases and hospitalizations. Except until yesterday or maybe a few days ago.

A point about the data

First a brief disclaimer about the data. The case numbers could be highly suspect as we don’t do testing as regularly anymore so people who may have a positive test may not be reporting such numbers to the government. So that would indicate cases numbers may be too low.

Or maybe not.

There is data related to wastewater but as far as I know, there are no raw data like the coronavirus where I can pull in the data to graphics.

There is hospitalization data that I do look at for the US and all signs point to improving hospitalization. The death rates appear to remain a steady 300-600 range, so definitely not zero but not at dire levels which was in thousands. In other words, coronavirus is pretty much here to stay with a relatively high level of death rates (relative to flu).

The American people seem to be okay with that.

USA: Cases, Deaths and Hospitalizations

Let’s first look at how it’s been looking like in the USA and the regions.

The graphics below, which I’ve expanded to full width for ease of viewing, clearly show that cases and deaths have been declining during the spring and summer after the huge spike in January/February. Very positive news.

Below is the hospitalization – again expanded to full width. I don’t know if you can see, but in the regional graph, the Northeast (the dark blue line) is showing signs of a rising hospitalization rate. It’s tiny but something to watch.

I have a series of hospitalization graphs for each of the regions where all of the states are shown.

Midwest

Hospitalizations going down in this region.

South

Ditto here: hospitalizations going down – even more so than the midwest.

West

No change here – hospitalizations going down. Wyoming and Montana might be a small exception. It is hard to tell at this point.

Northeast

Obviously, I saved the Northeast for the last because some states are showing obvious signs of increasing hospitalization. Maine and Vermont are standouts but I do believe Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut may not be far behind.

The question now is what can we expect for the fall? Now I don’t know but the experts fear that the fall will see rising hospitalizations because they are seeing the wastewater signs. Will it be as stressful as it was during January/February of this year? The experts don’t know. All they can do is surmise what could happen. It wouldn’t be surprising if hospitalization rises because people are no longer masking or doing social distancing and winter is coming. The holiday season is upon us.

All of those conditions tell us that yes, the cases and hospitalizations will rise but it may not be as bad.

Worldwide signs

Europe is showing signs of a rise. Up until one or two days ago, US and Japan stood at the top of a table of cases and then suddenly, Germany and France took top two spots. NEVER, in the entire duration of the pandemic has those two countries take the top spots. It was pretty much always the US until this past spring when Japan and South Korea took over. And then maybe in the past month or so, the US took top spot again.

Here are the tables:

Here’s the comparison of continents. Both graphs are the same with the exception that on the right-hand side, I highlighted the European line in yellow in the hopes of making it stand out better. Lately, there has been a faint rise in the curve. And the media has been noting the recent increase.

Here’s another view but with the top 10 individual European countries. There’s a lot going on here. I added a black line to sort of represent how I see the trends moving. The set of graphics on the left represent the entire pandemic from inception in 2020. The ones on the right have been truncated to the last 3 months so to strip out the overpowering January/February surge we can see better the more recent trends.

The bottom set of graphics are bar graphs depicting daily counts of all of the European countries. The upper set of graphics are line graphs where each line is one of the top 10 European countries (top 10 in daily moving average).

So, it looks like Europe is starting to surge, with Germany, France and Italy leading the way.

The experts say: where Europe goes, so goes the US. They are usually about a couple of weeks ahead of us.