Source: Calculated from NY Times Github COVID data repository and Commonwealth of Virginia COVID dashboard.
Red line is seven-day moving average excluding data for 1/17/2021. Blue line is seven-day moving average excluding data for 1/17/2021 and 1/16/2021. The reason for considering those exclusions is given below.
Continue reading Post #964: Virginia did, in fact, change some data reporting on 1/17/2021
These days, I’m seeing a lot of reporting on daily COVID deaths, and, as a totally new twist, on the total number of COVID patients currently in the hospital. But I’m not seeing much reporting on daily new COVID cases, or daily new hospital admissions.
Why? That’s because those first two are lagged indicators, and are still going up. It doesn’t go one inch deeper than that. Continue reading Post #963: COVID deaths, COVID total current hospitalizations, and the news hole.
You can read it at this link. It’s just one line in a much longer article.
“All of those metrics point to the conclusion that we may have passed the peak,” he said. ”
The person saying it is gen-u-ine college professor, at Georgetown University. So that’s worth something. And it got onto CNN. So that’s also worth something. Continue reading Post #962: “We may be past the peak” finally hits mainstream media
Source: Calculated from NY Times Github data repository, data reported through 1/17/2021.
This is a post from my narrow perspective as a resident of Northern Virginia. If you’re not from around here, this probably won’t interest you.
Right now, Virginia has the steepest upward trend in new COVID 19 cases per day in the country. And this is the steepest one-week change in trend that Virginia has yet seen.
What particularly stands out is that a) this runs sharply contrary to the downward trend in almost all other states, b) this puts Virginia grossly out-of-sync with Maryland and DC, which is a first for the pandemic, and c) by eye, this is the sharpest increase in new cases that Virginia has ever seen.
All suggest that something has changed fairly radically. Northern Virginia is so cosmopolitan, it makes me wonder about that new UK strain of COVID, and whether that’s here in numbers but Virginia simply hasn’t looked for it yet.
But, having dealt with health care data all my life, this also suggests that this might just be a data reporting error or change, in whole or in part. When things seem too unusual to be true, they are often are not true.
So this is an odd situation. And for me, it’s close to home. Let me see if there’s anything identifiable within the recent sharp increase. Continue reading Post #961: The current uptick in Virginia. Real or not?
Source: U.S. (dark blue line) and six regions, new cases / 100,000 / day, seven day moving average. Data ending 1/17/2021. Underlying data from the NY Times Github COIVD data repository.
The U.S. seven-day moving average for new COVID cases per 100,000 is back down to where it was a month-and-a-half ago. All six of broadly-defined regions show the same downward slope.
Note that the first two dips in the line above are due to the holidays. But this last decline is a new thing entirely. Given that we never had a post-holiday surge for either Thanksgiving or Christmas/New Year’s, it’s hard to believe that the current decline is somehow tied to the holidays. A large negative post-holiday un-surge doesn’t seem plausible. So it is what it is.
The current decline in daily new cases is so nearly universal that not only is every region trending down, just a handful of states don’t have a level-to-downward trend: Maine, Virginia and South Carolina. And the only high-population state with a level trend is Texas. That’s more-or-less apparent from the graph below, where almost all the lines in the right edge slope downward.
The big exception to that is Virginia. Not sure what we’re doing wrong, or whether it’s just our turn in the barrel, but new case counts are going through the roof. Yesterday we broke a record for daily new cases, by a factor of about 50%. After nine months of lying low, suddenly we’re the nation’s hotspot for new case growth? And not so much as a note of explanation of the Commonwealth’s COVID dashboard.
If that doesn’t somehow resolve with today’s update, I’ll take a deeper dive into the Virginia data to see if there’s anything obvious.
Edit: See next post. At least part of that appears to be some sort of data reporting error.
Edit: And almost as if on cue, there are two articles published today where they mention the possibility that we may be past the peak. See post after next post.
If you’ve been vaccinated, do you still need to wear a mask? I got this question from a reader a couple of days ago, and gave a partially-correct answer via email. Here, I’m going to post what I believe to be the fully-correct answer.
Briefly: Yes. The CDC says you still need to wear a mask, social distance, and so on. As long as the virus remains widely circulating in your community. That’s not just the CDC being its usual fussy self. There are sound reasons for that, involving non-trivial risk of catching and spreading disease.
In this post, I’ll try to explain that. But, at the minimum, that “90% efficacy” you read about doesn’t include asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infections. They only counted severe, symptomatic cases. The reduction in total coronavirus infections is unknown, and you can still spread the disease if you get a mild case of it. In addition, that 90% reduction was based on all the participants maintaining their existing COVID hygiene. If you get vaccinated, then start hanging around maskless in bars, you plausibly have greater odds of getting infected after the vaccine than you did before it.
But surely that has to prompt a few follow-on questions. I’m not going to provide detail on these, in this post. But I’ll give you my answers.
Well then, when can we ditch the @#$@# masks? I think the answer to that is “when the Governor says we can”. We’ll get there when we get there. I don’t think it goes any deeper that that. It really shouldn’t be an individual-level decision, but that’s a topic for another post.
Continue reading Post #959: If you’ve been vaccinated, do you still need to wear a mask?
In the spirit of “it can’t get but so much worse”, here’s an estimate of the fraction of the U.S. population that has already been infected with COVID-19.
As of today (1/17/2021), about 24 million cases have been reported. It is well- established that there are several actual infections for every one that is reported. That’s due to asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic individuals who don’t bother to go to a doctor about their symptoms, and so don’t get tested.
Here, I am assuming a conservative five-to-one ratio between total infections and formally-diagnosed infections. That five-to-one splits the difference between two different estimates from CDC staff, as documented in Post #940. A CDC estimate based on likelihood of getting tested would put that ratio at closer to 8-to-1. A CDC estimate based on presence of antibodies in a recent (non-random) sample of blood draws would put it closer to 4-to-1. I chose 5-to-1 as a seemingly reasonable estimate, as documented in that post.
Trees don’t grow to the sky?
What goes up must come down?
A trend is a trend until it ceases to be a trend?
Hope springs eternal?
Maybe the right adage is “If a tree falls in the forest,and no one hears it, does it still make a sound?” Because I don’t see any mainstream reporting on what’s happening in the sequence of graphs below. So I figured I’d post this, harking back to my guess that we were due to peak, in Post #930.
In any case, as the news ping-pongs from local crisis to local crisis, here’s a view how the U.S. situation developed over the past week. All graphs except the last were taken from prior posts, so the stuff in red was, in fact, done on the fly, not after-the-fact. Continue reading Post #957: COVID trends, but I’m not really sure what to title this one.
Yesterday, Post #952, 14 states had at least one case.
Today, 22 states have at least one case. Not clear that it’s actually spreading that fast, as states may now be finding it because they are looking for it. That said, it’s not going to be long before it’s been found more-or-less everywhere.
References for today’s additions:
This might be a case of finding what I’m looking for. But I seem to be seeing more mentions in minstream media regarding the need to wear N95 masks (respirators). In particular, I see more people pointing to citizen use of N95s as a rational response to the new, more contagious British variant of COVID-19.
In mid-2020, a policy of reserving N95s for health care workers made sense. But now that domestic production has increased several-fold, and even a hard-hit state like Minnesota has a half-year supply on hand for hospital use (see below), and we’re facing a faster-spreading COVID variant, it’s more than time to rethink that, and start getting N95s into the hands of the public.
Continue reading Post #955: More people saying “get a better mask”.
