The official count of daily new COVID-19 cases rounds to 32, roughly the same as it was three weeks ago. The weekly-percent-change numbers are meaningless due to the final echoes of the Memorial Day holiday. Continue reading Post #1535: COVID-19 trend to 6/13/2022, still at 32/100K/day.
This is in response to an article in today’s Washington Post, about the unusual nature of the 2021-22 season for flu and other respiratory viruses.
It is of course a) based on anecdotes (at one point, last month, one hospital saw …), b) relies on a handful of quotes, and c) ignores any systematic data on the relevant issues.
Basically, the thrust of the issue is that there’s now some huge problem with flu and other respiratory viruses, caused by COVID. Which all the COVID deniers then immediately assume “cause by our response to COVID”.
What the Post completely, totally, and utterly fails to mention is that the 2021-22 flu season has been incredibly mild by historical standards. Just by way of illustration here’s cumulative hospitalizations for flu, 2021-22 versus the last fully-normal flu season (2018-19):
Source: CDC Fluview.
By eye, looks like flu hospitalizations for this most recent season were about one-fifth the normal level.
In other words, this flu season isn’t some sort of man-made disaster. It’s not some sort of natural disaster. Fact is, under no stretch of the imagination can you consider it a disaster.
But looming disaster is the gist of the Post article. And the gist of most of the comments. In the end, since there’s nothing actionable about the article, all it does is feed the trolls.
All of which could have been avoided if the Post had started with this one simple fact first. But then it wouldn’t have been such wonderful click-bait.
The seasonal pattern of flu has been disrupted this year. Normally — again from CDC — about 1.5% of all hospital OPD visits would be for influenza-like illness at this time of year. But this year, it’s now 2.5%. That’s interesting, I’m pretty sure that passes any measures of being statistically significantly different from the average prior year. But that’s all it is.
The COVD-19 new case rate is unchanged at 33 new cases per 100K population per day, pretty much the same as it was three weeks ago.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 6/11/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
I can look back to my May 25 posting and see that my best guess, at that time, is that we were then three weeks from the peak of this wave. That was based on the behavior of the Northeast region, which led the nation by three weeks and had just peaked at that time.
From three weeks ago:
OK, if that actually turns out, then the Omicron-II wave will start to decline early next week.
So, while it seems like it’s taking forever for this most recent wave to dissipate, that’s not true. As yet, it’s taking just about as much time as you’d have guessed, based on the behavior of the Northeast region. And since that region has now formed a nice, neat top, there’s no reason to change that prediction.
That’s what I would call the predictable dynamics of the Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave. As goes the Northeast, so goes the nation.
Whether or not the newest variants (BA.4 and BA.5) will change that, it’s too soon to tell. My guess, in a just-prior post, is that they won’t.
It’s a dreary, rainy day here in Northern Virginia. Which is the perfect time to consult Virginia and national mortality data on COVID-19 and death by all causes.
I’ll close this post by looking COVID-19 mortality data from Virginia, where we have relatively timely information on official new cases and deaths by age. My point being to show how few individuals have died from COVID-19 during the Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave.
I’ve expressed that as a table of odds, below. A randomly selected individual had a one-in-X chance of dying from COVID-19 over this period.
Source: Calculated from Virginia Department of Health data. Population denominators are 2019 Census projection for Virginia.
In the past two months or so (the duration of this COVID-II wave, so far, in Virginia), the odds of a child dying from COVID were about 1 in 600,000. The odds of death for someone age 85+ was about 1 in 900.
Just to benchmark that, based on the U.S. life table for 2018, a man my age has a 1.4% annual risk of death from all causes. Pro-rating that to two months, and comparing to the COVID-19 data for the 55-64 age group, risk of dying from something other than COVID is about 25x higher than risk of dying from COVID.
Not quite as low as the likelihood of being struck by a meteor, but not high on my list of worries.
If I factor in vaccination and booster status — most deaths are still among the un-vaccinated — I’m more than 300x more likely to have died of something other than COVID, than to have died of COVID during this most recent (BA.2.12.1) wave.
At that level, I worry more about cholesterol than COVID. And that’s a good thing.
Am I still masking up in indoor public spaces? Sure, why not. It’s free and somewhat effective, and there still is quite a bit of COVID-19 in circulation. But, objectively, at this point, I can name a couple-dozen things that I need to worry about, regarding risk-of-death, far more than I need to worry about COVID,
The U.S. is still at 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, where it has been for roughly the past three weeks.
It is now time for the fourth and final phase of my 2022 tomato strategy, heat-tolerant tomatoes.
I outlined the overall approach in Post G21-001. There, among other things, I listed the varieties I’m planting. To recap, the goal is a continuous supply of tomatoes all summer long, with a large batch of paste tomatoes for producing dried tomatoes. Continue reading Post G22-022: Heat-tolerant tomatoes
We still seem to be on hold here in the U.S. We remain at 33 new cases per 100K population per day. That’s about where we’ve been for the past three weeks. The seven-day percent change isn’t really meaningful owing to the impact of Memorial Day on the data.
Continue reading Post #1531, COVID-19 update to 6/8/2022, and yet more variants.
FWIW, the U.S. now stands at 33 new cases per 100K population per day, based on the official counts of tests. Plus-or-minus reporting variations due to Memorial Day, it has been at that level for the past three weeks. Continue reading Post #1530, COVID-19 trend to 6/7/2022, now 33 cases, still feeling the effects of disturbed data reporting.
In a now-familiar pattern, what goes down must go up. Nominally, the seven-day moving average of the U.S. rate of new COVID-19 cases rose to 36 per 100K per day (up from about 31, last Friday).
But in reality, that’s mostly or entirely the final effect of Memorial Day on the reporting of new positive tests. In all likelihood, the actual new case count, absent the data reporting glitches, was more-or-less flat.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 6/7/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
In percentage terms, the increase we saw today was slightly less than the drop we saw a week ago. The product of the two one-day changes is less than 1.0, suggesting that we haven’t started on any summertime increase in the official COVID-19 case count yet.
Source: Percent with self-reported COVID-like symptoms from Carnegie-Mellon COVIDcast. Percent with positive test results from NY Time data cited above.
The chart above shows the official count of positive tests (orange line), and the fraction of respondents to a Carnegie-Mellon university on-line survey who report having COVID-19-like symptoms.
Fully acknowledging how loosey-goosey on-line surveys are, for sure, of late, a whole lot of people think they might have COVID-19, compared to the official count of positive tests.
But if we look at the fraction of all physician visits that appear to involve COVID-19, these people aren’t checking in with their doctor about their symptoms. By and large, the physician-visit line mirrors things like hospitalizations. Those haven’t risen much during the Omicron-II wave of COVID.
Source: Percent of physician visits for COVID from Carnegie-Mellon COVIDcast. Percent with positive test results from NY Time data cited above.
Taken together, these two pieces of data match my subjective assessment of what’s going on.
That’s about as far as I can take it. Based on the number of people reporting symptoms, COVID-19 is still pretty much rampant in the population. But because there’s so much cumulative immunity built up (via vaccination or prior infection), an increasing fraction of new cases requires no medical intervention.
And so, as Omicron-II has taken over (BA.2.12.1), new infections have increased, in line with the overall greater infectiousness of BA.2.12.1 relative to the original strains of Omicron. But that’s not translating into a proportionate number of cases requiring medical intervention. As a result, the official count of positive tests, and hospitalizations, and deaths, all show little new activity.
I guess this is how COVID-19 finally makes the transition into being a flu-like illness. Most people don’t need or seek help dealing with a case of seasonal flu. Best guess, that’s what’s now happening to COVID-19 under Omicron-II.
And that’s probably why you keep hearing about so many people who have been infected recently, despite no profound uptick in any of the official measures. Testing at home and dealing with it yourself has become the new norm.
I’m not quite sure what this means for tracking COVID-19 versus flu going forward. Really, in anticipation of a winter wave of both.
Right now, flu season is on the decline, at least based on lab testing. So there’s little doubt that what we’re looking at, in the self-reported symptoms chart above, is COVID-19. This is from the most recent week of CDC flu tracking, as of this writing:
Source: US CDC, Weekly influenza surveillance report, accessed 6/7/2022.
But think about the difficulty of tracking a disease that is common, but for which people rarely seek testing or treatment. How would you do that?
For flu, at the end of the day, the CDC does its overall impact-of-flu estimates by starting from the hard (i.e., reliable) data, hospital admissions for flu. It then uses the historical relationship between total flu cases, and flu hospitalizations, to inflate the hospitalization number up to an estimate of all symptomatic flu cases in the country.
Meanwhile, other tracking systems rely on symptoms. One way or the other, they look at people who show up (in a survey, in a physician’s office) with “influenza-like illness”. And if the symptoms are flu-like, that’s good enough for the running day-to-day count.
But with COVID-19, there is no stable historical relationship between new cases and new hospitalizations. That number has been all over the map during this pandemic, and now appears to be falling.
And we now have two disease that will be common — flu and COVID-19 — that, at least on the surface, seem to share a lot of symptoms for mild cases. I have to wonder about the extent to which we’ll ever be able to keep them separate in any symptoms-based tracking, and I wonder about the extent to which the CDC and other flu surveillance systems are now responding to both flu and COVID-19 in the community.
All told, I’m not expecting to see a whole lot of clarity on this issue, come this winter. At the end of the day, this probably only matters greatly for the unvaccinated-and-uninfected population, for those whose health is fragile, and for institutions such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
For those institutions serving the elderly, the vastly greater infectiousness of COVID-19 means that they probably would like to know when COVID-19 is prevalent in the community, compared to flu. And at this point, I’m not seeing any way for them to know that.
Source: University of Kentucky
I saw my first striped cucumber beetle of the year, at the end of last week. It feels like it’s too early in the season, but I’m reasonably sure I didn’t hallucinate it. Last year, they showed up in my garden at the end of May (Post #G21-027, Cucumber Beetles). So they’re right on time. Continue reading Post G22-021: First cucumber beetle of the season.
The official U.S. new COVID-19 case count still stands at 31 per 100K per day, up 7% in the past seven days. The U.S. average has been at more-or-less the same level for two weeks now.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 6/4/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
The CDC shows us at well under 300 deaths per day, still. Hospitalizations appear to be topping out around 3900 per day.
Surely I can’t let a day pass without spreading a bit of gloom and doom. Today’s nugget of negativity is that we’re less than a month from what ought to be the low point for the year, for new cases, based on the first two years of the pandemic.
So I look at that and I say, well, maybe this is about as good as it gets. We’ve got this ludicrously contagious disease — it’s been a while since I’ve seen anybody even venture a guess as to the R-nought, but the last one I recall was somewhere around 21. (Compared to maybe 1.5 for seasonal flu.) We’re at the point where reinfections are common and vaccines do almost nothing to prevent infection (though they are still quite effective against severe infection).
But eventually, I come to my senses and look around. If there is some “natural” rate of new infections, it surely isn’t apparent by looking internationally. Below is a view of the world’s daily COVID-19 infection rates since 1/1/2022. Although the new infection rates appear to be stabilizing around the world, they are stabilizing at vastly different reported rates in different areas. The U.S. is the middle of the pack — a very spread-out pack.
Source: Our world in data, annotations mine.
You can’t rationally look at that and conclude that we’re stuck at our current new case rate forever. My conclusion is that plenty of industrialized nations have lower rates than we do right now. And there’s no obvious reason why our rate should remain permanently high.
