There is no new big surge of COVID-19 cases in Virginia. We don’t have to guess about that because Virginia continues to gather the same benchmark PCR test data that it did all throughout the pandemic.
At present, Virginia is showing 10 new cases (new positive COVID-19 PCR tests) per 100K population per day. That’s up from our normal summertime minimum of around 2 / 100K day. And is a level we saw off and on throughout the pandemic.
But the point is, it’s normal. In so far as anything about the post-pandemic U.S. can be considered normal.
Background
I keep reading news articles that boil down to “we’re in another big COVID-19 outbreak”. Normally, I’d figure those were just clickbait. In particular, the estimates given in the last one I read — one person in 50 has an active COVID-19 infection right now — seemed preposterous. (Or, “lacked face validity”, as I would have said professionally.)
But this past week, here in Vienna, a friend came down with COVID-19. Her description makes it sound like the worst-ever case of flu, coupled with (hopefully temporary) loss of sense of smell.
So I thought I might take another look at what the current rate of infections is. I think COVID-19 is still worth keeping an eye on. Particularly if you’re in the 25% of the population that has never had it.
But how? For example, how do the authors of those various clickbait pieces claim to know what the current rate of infections is? Let alone back up a claim that one person in 50 is currently infected?
Near as I can tell, the only timely information for the U.S. as a whole is hospitalizations with COVID. Those are heavily concentrated among the oldest old, and the ratio of cases to hospitalizations varies enormously across states and over time. So it’s hard to put the current hospitalization number in perspective, or to hazard a guess as to total cases, based on the number hospitalized.
Virginia still collects data on new infections.
I decided to see what information was available for my locality, Fairfax County, VA. And, to my surprise, I found that Virginia still collects and publishes counts of positive COVID-19 PCR tests, by locality.
I was a little baffled by this because the Federally-declared COVID emergency is long over. How can Virginia still obtain that infomation?
You have to go way down into the footnotes to figure out what Virginia is doing. Those tests are done in (a handful of) licensed clinical labs, and Virginia requires those labs to report positive PCR tests for COVID, as one of many “reportable” diseases. Apparently, the legal mandate to require such reporting dates back more than a century, to a 1919 Virginia public health law aimed at controlling infectious disease outbreaks.
On the downside, the count of positive PCR tests for COVID suffers from the same problems that it always did. Not everyone who has COVID gets tested. Not everyone tested opts for a lab-based test. And the reduction in typical case severity (both from infection-acquired immunity and vaccine-acquired immunity) means fewer tests per case, period, because fewer cases will appear sever enough to warrant testing of any sort.
On the plus side, it has always had these issues, so this should be roughly comparable to the information that was published during the pandemic. Using the same methods I used at that time, I should be able to come up with a fairly consistent characterization of (e.g.) how risky it is to be in crowds now.
Virginia currently averages 10.5 new COVID-19 cases, per 100,000 population, per day. Per the count of positive PCR tests. The data below are daily data, but Virginia only updates the information once a week.
Source: Virginia Department of Health.
And that should be comparable with prior data. In particular I can resurrect my old rule-of-thumb that active infections is about nine times the number of positive PCR tests. Which would mean that, in Virginia, roughly one person in 1000 is walking around in an infectious state with COVID.
All-in-all, for Virginia, at least, the count of new cases is “normal”. That is, about like what it was in prior years, once we got vaccines and got past the initial surge of the Omicron variant. The mid-summer low was somewhere around 2 (positive PCR tests per 100K per day), which as I recall is about what it was in prior years. And the current rate of 10/100K/day is a typical mid-range value from the pandemic period.
Virginia still allows you to dig down to the data for your particular county or city. So here’s Fairfax County, VA, showing the data for from April 2020 to the present.
Source: Calculated from data available from the Virginia Department of Health.
Looking just at 2023 in isolation, you can see that there’s no huge uptick, just the normal slow rise from the normal mid-summer lull.
Source: Calculated from data available from the Virginia Department of Health.
The current new-positive rate is about 8 / 100K / day here, slightly lower than the last time my wife and I returned to going to the gym regularly. At that time, I wore a (ventilated) 3M N95 mask (Post #1630, November 7, 2022). Don’t know whether it’s time to begin doing that again or not.
Conclusion.
As of yesterday, there’s no huge uptick in cases in Fairfax County, or in Virginia as a whole.
I can’t say what’s going on in other parts of the country. But in Virginia, as far as the COVID new case rate goes, it’s just business as usual. This year saw a summer minimum of around 2 / 100K / day. Over the past couple of months, that has risen to around 10 / 100K / day. All quite “normal”, in the sense of matching what occurred last year.
And, probably as importantly, the observed new case rate translates (via my nine-fold rule) into an estimate that about one person in a thousand is currently walking around, infectious with COVID, in my area. Which is a far cry from the one-in-50 estimate that crawled its way into the last clickbait article I read.
That’s not to say that this isn’t a problem. People who claim that COVID 19 is no more of a problem than the common cold are simply misinformed.
For example, the peak week of last year’s flu season saw 30,000 people newly hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed flu (calculated from CDC Fluview data). By contrast, in early September 2023 we’re already hospitalizing 20,000 people a week with laboratory-confirmed COVID (per the CDC). But if history is a guide, the peak of COVID for this year is more than three months away.
Similarly, per the CDC, COVID currently accounts for about 2 percent of deaths.
But if you’re not a frail elderly person, or otherwise in a high-risk group, the COVID-19 situation today normal. At least in Virginia.
I guess this is the new normal. You have to treat it as such. No more, no less.
