“You have to do the hard work”

“You have to do the work”, “Work hard, play hard”, “Show up and do the work”, “There are no shortcuts”.

These refrains are thrown around a lot but I don’t think the average American got it in them to “do the hard work” when it comes to combatting the coronavirus.

Travel Data

Source of data: TSA checkpoint data https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput

I was able to pull some travel checkpoint data from the TSA site:

and here’s a first blush chart showing how travel this year compares to last year:

Obviously, this year (blue line) is way less than last year (top orange line) but the news has been talking about the highest levels of travel for this year occurring during the Thanksgiving holidays but, to me, it is not readily apparent in the chart unless you squint your eyes. I feared I was imagining that uptick, so I did a second analysis by filtering the data for days with travel over 1 million and BINGO, I now get why the news have been talking about the travel levels:

Those over 1 million travelers occurred basically during the Thanksgiving travel.

It doesn’t look like we are putting in the hard work of limiting our social gathering to help reduce the spread of the virus. Right now, hospitals are approaching the limit of their resources, both in terms of number of beds available and, more importantly, the number of medical personnel. After nine or ten months, the medical profession is approaching extreme fatigue levels and some are looking for a different career because we Americans will not do the hard work of restricting our social activities or wearing masks.

I get it: it’s hard to wear a mask and to curtail our social contacts. Heck, in the mornings I don’t want to do my exercise and am sorely tempted to laze away the day. But, if I don’t exercise, I’m only hurting myself; on the other hand, if you don’t practice wearing masks or curtail your travels and social gathering, you are potentially hurting others. That’s the big difference.

The good news is at least 60% of us changed our minds about traveling and getting together for the Thanksgiving. The bad news is that leaves about 40% indulging in their desires.

Canada data

Source of data: Wikipedia data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory

So, I’ve been hearing in the news that Canada had their own Thanksgiving in October, more specifically on October 12, and that the country experienced a surge in cases afterward, so I decided to pull data that I have from Wikipedia and plot Canada’s cases to see if I could spot the surge.

I couldn’t.

When I look at the chart for daily cases (the charts on the left hand side), I see the rise in cases starting in September rather than October, so I wasn’t seeing what the news was talking about, but if I looked at the chart for deaths (the set on the right), I saw that the moving average for deaths started to rise right on October 12th, after that small rise and decline (“the hump”) just before October 12th. I’ve circled “the hump” in red.

Realistically, I don’t think the news were talking about the death counts.

By the way, I’ve included a chart, found on both the right and left sides, that compares Canada (bright aqua blue line) with the US (bright green line) so you can see the extreme nature of the US cases and deaths.

US versus world

Source of data: Wikipedia data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory

The latest updates indicate that US is still pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of case counts increasing. India has managed to mightily flatten theirs and Europe has pulled back from their rise such that their case counts are declining in a fairly strong fashion. We’ve never been able to do that.

As a matter of fact, here’s a table showing our case count to be about 21% of the world and death count 18% of the world. Previously, we used to hover around 20% for both case and death counts and then we dipped to about 18%. Unfortunately, now our case counts are truly surging.

Oh yes, we’re so exceptional.

And, I could be imagining it, but it feels like the death count is just about to start surging; there is a slight kink in the curve at the end.

The good news: the Midwest surge appears to have peaked

Source of data: Wikipedia data for cases – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_data/United_States_medical_cases

Source of data: COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic data under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-4.0 license for deaths, hospitalizations and positivity – https://covidtracking.com/api/v1/states/daily.csv

But the good news is that it looks like the Midwest case counts and hospitalization surge has peaked…for now. Death count is still going up.

Here’s the entire Midwest region chart showing each state in the region. You can see a number of states with cases starting to decline from the peak. I don’t know if that trend will last because of the Thanksgiving holidays.

100K cases per day

We’re still running at over 100K cases per day, an amount that has been trending at that level since after the election. Yesterday, which was Thanksgiving, came in at over 100K with 18 states not reporting in! Kind of makes you wonder what the total amount would have been if all states had reported their numbers.

Anyway, this is where we stand before the surge on top of the current surge kicks in, which is expected to happen in about 2 or 3 weeks. Cases are expected to start rising before Christmas with hospitalization surges possibly happening during the week of Christmas and then deaths following thereafter.

Wow. This is going to be some kind of Christmas.

We could have prevented this just by avoiding travel and social gatherings, but we just never learn. We just can’t “do the hard work”.

I hope Thanksgiving was worth it.