Featherbedding (v): The practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers.
Still around 13 new cases per 100K per day, still climbing at about 30 percent per week. The only change today is that now, all the regions of the U.S. are showing increases in cases.
The more interesting news is that CDC is tracking a new sub-strain of Omicron (BA.2.12.1). The incidence of this new strain appears to explain why New York/New England has had such a rise in cases, while much of the rest of the country has not.
Above: Used Ball lids. The one on the left clearly shows the groove left by the canning jar. The one on the right was boiled for 20 minutes, which flattened that groove considerably. I picked up this tip boiling lids if you plan to re-use them from the blog A Traditional Life.
The vacuum sealer is that rare device that serves as both a kitchen appliance and a source of entertainment. Every time I run my new Nesco VS-09, I practically want to applaud when it finishes.
I don’t normally give much thought to air. Until it’s all gone. Then the arithmetic of 15 pounds per square inch leads to the realization that this goofy little countertop appliance generates a literal half-ton of crushing force on a 6″ x 10″ pint-sized bag.
But I digress. I actually bought this for the serious purpose of preserving garden produce. The fact that I find the process and results to be so entertaining is just icing on the (perfectly flat half-inch thick piece of) cake.
In any event, there is a serious purpose to this post. And that is to show that if you have a freezer that’s already running, then freezing your tomatoes is by far the most energy-efficient way to preserve them.The only method that would beat that is solar drying, and I haven’t quite figured out how to do that well in my humid Virginia climate.
Tomatoes as freezer free-riders.
The last thing I need is another kitchen appliance.
But I bought this vacuum sealer anyway, after thinking through all the food preservation I did last year. Of all the pickling, canning, drying, and freezing, by far, the tastiest, most garden-fresh results came from freezing. With drying (dried tomatoes) a close second, due to the intense flavors that produces.
And so, purely from a quality standpoint, for tomatoes to be used in soups and stews, my wife and I agree that freezing is the best option. It preserves that fresh tomato taste. But how does it stack up in terms of energy use?
Freezing gets a bad rap,as a means of home food preservation, for its relatively high energy use. But I think that’s not entirely correct.
If you run a freezer expressly for the purpose of preserving garden produce, then, sure, I’d bet that freezing has a fairly high energy cost. In that case, you’d have to pro-rate the annual electricity use of that freezer over the pounds of produce preserved. (Because, by assumption, you wouldn’t be running that freezer if you weren’t using it to preserve your garden produce.)
Just tossing out some round numbers, based on past experience, I’d bet that a typical 15-cubic-foot chest freezer has enough space to store 300 pounds of produce, and consumes about 300 kilowatt-hours (KWH) of electricity per year.
So, roughly speaking, if you run that freezer because you use it to preserve your produce, you’d consume about 1 KWH of energy for every pound of produce preserved.
By contrast, if you are already running a freezer, and will continue to run it regardless, and you have the space, then freezing your produce only costs you the energy needed to freeze it in the first place. The cost of running the filled freezer doesn’t count, because you’d bear that cost in any case.
My fridge comes with a big freezer. It’s not like I’m planning to unplug that any time soon. And so, I’m perfectly happy to let my frozen garden produce be a free rider here — taking advantage of the fact that the freezer is running, but not being asked to “pay” for it.
In that case, the only additional energy cost is the cost of getting the room-temperature produce down to the 0 F temperature of the freezer. Given that (e.g.) tomatoes are 94% water, that’s more or less the energy required to bring one pound of room temperature water down to 0 F. Including the one BTU per pound required to cool the water, and the 144 BTUs per pound required to convert to ice, that works out to (70 + 144 =) 214 BTUs, or (at 3.4 BTUs per watt-hour) 63 watt-hours. So, if you are just tossing your produce into a freezer that is going to be running in any case, freezing it takes0.063 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.
You might think that’s a bit of a cheat, because one way or the other, you’ll want to peel those tomatoes before you use them. The most typical methods for peeling them involve heat (either boiling water, or holding them in the flame of a gas stove). But — surprise — it’s actually a snap to peel them after they’ve been frozen, per this YouTube video.
Take a look around 47 seconds into that video. My jaw dropped just after the tomato did. I know the term life-changing is overused, so let’s just say this was a tomato-life changing revelation for me. As in, I’m never going blanch and peel a tomato ever again. Arguably, it may actually take less energy to freeze-and-peel than to blanch-and-peel, what with the energy costs required to boil the water and cool the tomato afterwards.
Other preservation methods
I have already tracked the energy costs of preserving by canning or drying, in various earlier posts. Let me bring all of that together in one place, below.
Drying tomatoes in my four-tray Nesco dehydrator consumed 8 KWH of electricity (per Post G21-049). That was in the humid outdoor Virginia summer. I am fairly sure that each tray can hold less than a pound of quarter-inch-thick tomato slices,, but a) I could stack up to 12 trays at a time for drying, and b) those were very “wet” slicing tomatoes, not the paste tomatoes that are normally used for drying. That said, for illustration, let me just assume one pound per tray, four trays, yield 2 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.
Canning tomatoes in a water-bath canner consumes a considerable amount of energy as well. I did the full workup on the energy cost of home canning two years ago, in Post #G22. I had to do that because, as far as I can see, the rigorous research literature on this crucial topic looks like this:
In any case, the all-in energy cost for canning five quarts of pickles, on a gas stove, in an air-conditioned house, was 5528 kilocalories (kcal).
Per the USDA guide to home canning, quarts of pickles require a much shorter processing (boiling) ,time (15 minutes) compared to quarts of tomatoes (45 minutes) in a water-bath canner.
Based on my prior calculation (shown above), I need to add another 800 Kcal to account for that, bringing the total up to 5300 Kcal for 5 quarts (= 10 pounds) of tomatoes. At 1.16 watt-hours per kilocalorie, that works out to be 0.6 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.
I should note that this is a little conservative, because you have to peel the tomatoes first. That’s going to involve a little additional boiling time. But with all the boiling that’s taking place with the canning, I figured that was more-or-less rounding error.
Finally, I can take a rough guess at the energy cost of my crock-pot spaghetti sauce. Crock-pot spaghetti sauce (Post #G21-048) absolutely minimizes the labor input, and is idiot-proof to boot. But it requires processing tomatoes in both a pressure cooker (briefly) and a crock-pot (overnight). For four quarts (eight pounds), the crock-pot portion uses about 4 KWH. But the pressure-cooker portion (20 minutes at pressure) likely used almost as much energy as canning, so for four quarts I need to add one-third of my pickle canning estimate above, which, by the time all the arithmetical dust has settled, adds another 2 KWH. Or a total of 6 KWH for 8 pounds of tomatoes, or 0.75 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.
Edit, fall 2024: In hindsight, that’s much more energy-intensive than a more traditional reduce-it-on-the-stove approach to making tomato sauce. A crock pot is, in fact, a terrible (but idiot-proof) choice if you want to evaporate water out of a sauce. I’ve gone back to making my spaghetti sauce by boiling down tomatoes on the stove, like a normal person. I still briefly pressure-cook, dump in a strainer to remove the liquid, pass the solids though a Foley mill to remove the skins, then reduce. This allows me to use all types of tomatoes, including salad and cherry tomatoes, without having to peel or seed them first.
There’s no additional energy cost for peeling in this method, because the entire batch of tomatoes is run through a Foley mill after pressure-cooking. That takes out the peels and (most of) the seeds.
Let me now produce the nice neat table of energy required for food preservation, all of it expressed in terms of KWH of energy per pound of produce preserved.
All of that comes with some caveats. The canning was done on a gas stove in an air-conditioned house. The drying was done outside, in humid air. I could dry up to twelve trays at once, instead of the four that I already owned. Maybe there’s a little more energy required for the blanch-and-peel step in some methods. And so on.
Nevertheless, the results are so clear as to be undeniable. (So clear that I double-checked that freezer math a couple of times). If you have space in your freezer, and you’re going to run that freezer anyway, by far the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes is to toss them in the freezer. And, per that YouTube video above, peel them as you thaw and use them.
I surely need to mention the one common method that isn’t on the list, solar (or open-air) drying. Plausibly that has zero energy cost, but I have not (yet) figured out how to do that in my humid Virginia climate. I’m already working on how I’m going to improve my simple $18 plastic-tote food dryer (Post #G21-049). The solution might be as easy as “don’t overload it”.
Two minor caveats: COP and GHG sold separately.
Two minor factors make this conclusion somewhat less that complete. Those are coefficient of performance (COP) of a freezer, and the different rate of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for natural gas and electricity used in the home. Near as I can tell, neither of these results in any material change in the relative efficiency of the various preservation methods.
First, this calculation isn’t complete because it doesn’t factor in the energy conversion efficiency or coefficient of performance (COP) of refrigerators or freezers. The coefficient of performance for a heat pump is the amount of heat energy it can move, for a given amount of electricity supplied to it. Almost all commercially-used heat pumps have a COP greater than 1.0. That is, they can move more than 1 KWH of heat energy for every KWH of electricity they consume. COPs for modern AC or heat pump units typically run around 2.5 to 3.5 (per the link above).
The estimate above — 0.063 KWH — is the amount of heat that needs to be (re)moved from the interior of the freezer. It will actually take less than 0.063 KWH to do that, because fridges and freezers are just another form of heat pump with a COP greater than one. While Wikipedia (cited above) assures me that they have a COP greater than 1.0, I have yet to find a source that will pin that down further. The best I’ve found is a passing reference to a COP of around 1.0 for a deep freeze unit (per this reference).
The bottom line is that a typical home freezer might use somewhat less than 0.063 KWH to remove 0.063 KWH of heat energy from its interior. But how much less, I can’t find the source that will let me pin that down. I suspect that, given the large temperature differential between interior and exterior, the COP of most freezers isn’t much higher than 1.0 or so.
Finally, KWH is not the same as GHG (greenhouse gases). This only measures energy consumed within the home, and does not differentiate between natural gas and electricity. Fossil-fuel based electrical generation is far from 100% efficient, so the actual amount of fuel consumed (to generate the electricity) is a low multiple of the energy actually delivered to the house. But in addition, electrical generation consists of a mix of generation sources, some of which create greenhouse gases, some of which do not. If the ultimate question is one of carbon footprint, we’d have to modify this calculation, treat electricity and natural gas separately, and then redo it for some assumed electrical generation mix.
That said, when I take a rough cut at the difference between natural gas (burned in a stove) and electricity (produced with a typical U.S. generating mix), I’m not sure that adjusting for each fuel type separately would make much difference.
Natural gas releases 100% of its energy within the home. But a typical natural gas stove is only about 40% efficient. That’s the energy that goes into whatever you are trying to cook, with the rest simply serving to heat up the kitchen. Basically, for every 100 units of C02 produced, you get 40 units of usable energy from your gas stove (Whatever units might mean, in this case).
For electricity, by contrast, the amount of fuel burned at the generating plant is far more than the amount that makes it into your home. But once it gets to your home, I’ve either directly measured 100% of what was consumed, or the theoretical calculation (for freezing) should be close to that. And so, as with natural gas, for every 100 units of C02 produced in generating electricity, you get X units of usable energy in the home.
The problem is that X depends on the generating mix that feeds your particular section of the grid. Even so, let me do the arithmetic for Virginia’s electrical grid.
Last time I checked, Virginia’s electrical grid released 0.7 pounds of CO2 per KWH of electricity delivered. Starting from that, I’m going to compare C02/KWH of usable energy for the Virginia grid versus a 40 percent efficient gas stove.
The EPA shows that burning a therm of natural gas releases an average of 0.0053 metric tons of C02. At 2204 pounds per metric ton, that’s 11.7 pounds of C02 per therm. A therm is 100,000 BTUs, and there are 3.4 BTUs per watt-hour.
Slapping that all together, burning a therm of natural gas produces 11.7 pounds of C02 and 29.4 KWH of (heat) energy, or 0.4 lbs C02 per KWH.
But a natural gas stove is only 40% efficient. A stove has to use (1/.40 =) 2.5x as much natural gas to deliver that usable KWH of heat. The bottom line is that a 40 percent efficient natural gas stove releases 1.0 pounds C02 for every usable KWH of heat delivered in the home.
And so, per KWH of usable energy, in terms of GHG emissions, electricity (in Virginia, at 0.7 lbs C02 per usable KWH) is slightly cleaner than natural gas burned in a (typical) 40 percent efficient stove. But only slightly. So the electrical options actually perform a little bit better than shown in the table above, relative to the gas-stove-intensive canning.
There’s nothing in any of that to change the conclusion that tossing your tomatoes into a freezer that would be running in any case is by far the most energy-efficient way to preserve them.
So, what about that vacuum sealer?
All of the above brings me back to my new toy, the vacuum sealer. If I’m going to freeze my tomatoes, the binding constraint is now the space they take up in the freezer, and secondarily, the length of time they’ll last once frozen. Both of which will be best addressed by vacuum-sealing them.
Most sources suggest that you freeze the tomatoes before vacuum-sealing. But at least one source shows tomato chunks that were vacuum-sealed and then frozen. That’s what I’m now aiming to do, only using whole tomatoes, not chunks. Given the literal tons of force that one of these sealers can generate, I’ll have to use the setting that allows the strength of the vacuum to be controlled manually. In the end, I’m aiming for a freezer stocked with nice, flat, well-preserved packages of energy-efficient frozen tomatoes.
With any luck, we’ll see how that all plays out in a few months.
Before I say anything else: The Town of Vienna will continue to pick up your leaves every fall. Without fail. Nobody is talking about stopping leaf pickup. This is all about how the Town disposes of those leaves, once it gathers them.
This Monday (4/18/2022), Vienna Town Council will hold a conference session in which they will continue their discussion of alternative ways to collect and dispose of leaves. You can find the background materials at the link on this web page. My last posts on this topic were Post #1461, Post #1462, and Post #1463. And Post #1464
In this post, I want to make a simple point about the money costs and savings of what has been proposed. In particular, under what appears to be the most reasonable proposal (“Option 3, long haul”), the Town will pay out somewhat more to contractors than it does now. But it will be paid back more than twice the value of that in terms of Department of Public Works staff time and other resource costs that will be freed up for use in other ongoing tasks.
In effect, the greater efficiency of this new option, compared to the current approach, more-or-less allows the Town to obtain a modest amount of staff labor at less than half the normal cost.
It’s a unique opportunity for the Town to get an immediate two-to-one return on investment. For $61K worth of contracted services, the Town frees up $135K worth of Department of Public Works labor.
Details are given in the final section below.
Background.
In the 3/22/2022 Vienna Town Council meeting, there was an extensive discussion and public hearing on changing the way Vienna disposes of its leaves in the Fall. If you need the background, the best source is probably the staff presentation, available from the link on this Town of Vienna Granicus web page.
The issue is that the Town currently dumps, grinds, and mulches its leaves on a tract of land that is smack in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood.
Briefly, it’s noisy and it stinks. And between the multi-month period of leaf collection in the Fall, and the deliveries of “free” mulch in the Spring, that goes on for quite some time.
In effect, the Town of Vienna operates an industrial-scale waste disposal facility, seasonally, in the middle of an area zoned for and used as a residential area.
You might well ask, how can the Town operate an industrial facility in a residential area? That’s not a legally-allowed use of land that is zoned residential. The answer is that the Town long ago issued itself a “conditional use permit” to do that. And, hey presto, it was therefore legal for the Town to do this. And yet, everyone agrees that under no circumstances would the Town allow a private enterprise do to the same thing — place a noisy commercial operation in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood.
And just in case that legal self-dealing didn’t rub quite enough salt in the neighbor’s wounds, the land in question was labeled and used as park land for decades prior to this. In fact, most (but not all) on-line mapping services still label the tract in question by its traditional name, Beulah Road Park.
Source: Top map, USPS EDDM website, bottom map, Duck Duck Go search.
Unsurprisingly, the neighbors around that leaf dump/mulch-grinding facility objected. It has been an ongoing sore point for them.
But there were two new developments in the past couple of years.
First, at some point in the last campaign for Mayor of Vienna, the current Mayor seemed to have promised to do something about it. So, in theory, righting this situation is on the TOV government’s radar screen.
And, blessedly, the Town’s tub grinder died. This is the large and loud machine that is at the heart of the Town’s current approach, used to grind the leaves prior to mulching. I believe the repair is either impossible or uneconomic, and that a replacement device of the same size would now cost upwards of half-a-million dollars.
And that provided an opportunity for everybody to step back and reconsider how the Town goes about this. Particularly given that we have examples from both Fairfax County and from the Town of Herndon, both of whom manage to get rid of their leaves annually without trashing a residential neighborhood in the process.
Which, in turn, led to taking a hard look at the resources currently consumed by this process. Leading to the conclusion that the Town’s “free” mulch, which it literally will truck to your home for free, actually has an average cost of about $125 per truck load. Or — unsurprisingly — in the ballpark of what it costs local commercial mulch supply firms to supply it.
I went through all of that in my prior posts.
Option 3, long haul, and objections to it.
At the prior Town Council meeting/public hearing on this topic, it seemed like the “long haul” option had the most support. Under that approach the Town would simply haul the leaves directly to Loudoun Composting for disposal. The fully-allocated cost of that was $74K (or about 16 percent) cheaper than the current approach, and it would free up that eight-acre tract of land known as Beulah Road Park for some higher-valued use than being the in-town leaf dump.
That said, I noted a few possible sticking points that were raised:
Some people wanted to keep the existing system with “free” mulch for Town residents. They were in the clear minority of those who showed up to speak.
There was some uncertainty over the costs, and the possible impact of fuel cost increases. There was also concern if total fossil fuel use were to rise.
There was some concern over how “robust” the approach of hauling the leaves directly to Loudoun Composting would be. E.g., could this be derailed by a traffic accident on I-66.
Finally, there was concern that, while the fully-allocated cost of leaf collection would fall, the Town’s total budget costs would actually increase.
Objection 1: The end of “free” mulch
There’s no answer to that first objection that will leave the current mulch recipients happy. People like free stuff. Even if giving stuff away is ludicrously inefficient from an economic standpoint. And costs the taxpayers money.
But now that the Town knows that it has an average cost of $125 a load for that “free” mulch, it really has no business giving it away. The only justifiable solution is to charge a fair rate for it — meaning its own average cost of $125 a load.
To the extent that anyone still demands it at that price, the town could satisfy that demand by using Town trucks and personnel to obtain free Fairfax County mulch, from the I-66 transfer station, and bring that into Town. Or, better, cut a deal with Loudoun Composting to bring back a few loads of finished mulch, instead of deadheading back on each trip.
I’m sure that the people who get free mulch now will be unhappy with having to pay for it. But the Town can’t look at its own data showing an average cost of production of $125 per load, all-in, and continue to give that away. That’s not good governance.
My point is, if the Town will charge a reasonable rate for it, the demand for Town-supplied much will drop to a minimal level. Possibly zero. And there are any number of ways to provide finished mulch to the handful of citizens who will not give up the tradition of Town-supplied mulch, without resorting to large scale production of mulch within the Town of Vienna.
Objection 2: Fuel price increases matter, as does total fossil fuel use.
I went through most of the numbers in Post #1464. The upshot is that neither of these factors matters much.
All three options involve roughly the same number of truck-miles. Which is not a surprise, as the bulk of the miles under all three options is in trucking the leaves out to Loudoun County. If anything, this argues for doing the long haul with larger trucks, if possible. But I don’t think that’s possible, as those same trucks must be used to pick the leaves up off the streets.
It’s also easy enough to show that fuel prices are a minor consideration. First, I come up with a guess of about 1400 gallons of diesel burned in the trucks. That’s based on the mileage above, and a guess of 9 MPG average for the mix of Town trucks, based on mostly highway miles. Toss in another few hundred gallons for running the leaf vacuums, and surely the entire enterprise burns no more than 2000 gallons of fuel. At that rate, each $1 rise in the price of a gallon of fuel adds just $2000 to overall cost. That’s small enough to get lost in rounding error.
Objection 3: Is this process robust?
There’s really no way to find out until they try it. But my understanding is that Fairfax County does its own leaf pickups this way, with direct haul of the leaves to their final destination using contract truckers. I have to believe that if it works for Fairfax County, it should work for us.
Objection 4: Overall increase in budget.
That’s the subject of the next section.
Another look at the budget for Option 3, long haul
The points made in this section are simple.
Option 3 increases the Town’s overall budget because it requires the Town to spend about $61K on contracted services. But the Town has no plans to fire any Department of Public Works (DPW) staff to offset that, even if fewer total staff hours are required for leaf collection and disposal.
But:
But, first, the amount of money we are discussing here is small, compared to the operating budget of the Vienna Department of Public Works. DPW should have no problem putting that freed-up staff time to productive use.
And, more importantly, because the new approach is so much more efficient, the Town gets a huge return-on-investment from that additional $61K spending on contracted costs. The Town doesn’t just get a dollar-for-dollar return. It’s not just substituting $61K of contract labor for $61K of staff labor. It gets that, and in additional it gets a return from adopting this more-efficient method for leaf collection and disposal. The greater efficiency of the new approach leverages that $61K investment in contracted services into $135K worth of DPW labor and other costs.
To get to the bottom line, those additional budget costs, in the form of truck rental and leaf disposal costs, generate a better-than-two-to-one return on investment. Putting that another way, assuming that there is productive work for DPW staff to do, the change in leaf collection effectively purchases that additional work at less than half the usual price.
If Vienna Town Council was happy to fund DPWs existing workload at its current average cost, they really shouldn’t balk at purchasing a little more maintenance and repair at half-price.
And now:
The numbers
First, let me re-arrange Town staff’s cost numbers for the leaf proposals, to show the breakout of costs that are “internal” to the Town of Vienna, and cost that are paid to external vendors.
Source: Base data taken from TOV staff presentation at the 3/22/2022 Town Council meeting.
(Note the current approach has $39K in combined grinding and disposal fees. The two new approaches both have $39K in leaf disposal fees. So that’s a wash, in terms of contracted costs. As a result, the only difference in total contracted cost is the trucking cost under Option 3.)
At issue is the figure in yellow — a $61,000 increase in payments to contractors and other entities. The argument is that because the Town will not (or cannot) cut DPW staff in response to these changes, it’s going to have to keep paying the staff and pay this additional $61,000.
First, put this in perspective by comparing it to the existing TOV DPW budget. In FY 21-22, the TOV DPW operating budget was a just about $16 million (Town of Vienna adopted 2021-22 budget, page 72). This $61K amounts to about a 0.4% budget increase in the DPW budget.
Second, now focus on the $135K reduction in costs internal to the Town of Vienna, under Option 3. This means that in return for streamlining the leaf collection and disposal process, and shelling out $61K in contractor costs, DPW now has $135K worth of resources (mostly, labor) freed up, available for other work around town.
The $61K increase in the total budget buys the Town $135K worth of labor services from Town of Vienna employees. These are the services no longer needed with the streamlined leaf collection and disposal process. In effect, by going for Option 3, it obtains those labor services for less than half-price.
I think that’s the right way to view this. And I think that’s a good deal, no matter how you slice it. As long as there is some productive work for DPW staff to be doing. And I don’t think that anybody in the TOV doubts that there is always work that DPW could be doing.
Summary
Through a series of happy circumstances, the Town has a chance to re-think its leaf collection and disposal process. And maybe, just maybe, rid a Vienna neighborhood of the burden the Town imposed on it two decades ago,
Option 3 looks like a clear win-win for the Town and the neighborhood. Not only does it liberate that eight-acre park to be a park again, it gives the Town the opportunity to obtain $135K worth of labor for a mere $61K investment in new funding for contracted services. (The difference between those two figures arises from the greater efficiency of Option 3 relative to the current approach).
Near as I can tell, the only individuals who will see a downside from this are those who currently obtain “free” (that is, taxpayer-paid) mulch from the Town. As an economist, my response to that is that the only defensibly Town position is that those who want that mulch should pay the Town’s average cost of production for it. And if any still do, I’d bet that the relatively modest remaining demand could be met by purchasing a few truckloads of finished mulch from Loudoun Composting, using the Town’s trucks to bring it back.
At that point, maybe Vienna should just do what Fairfax did for years, and put modest piles of mulch in the unused corners of a few parks. Those who want free Town mulch are welcome to drive up and shovel up a few trashcans of it, for use around the home. Free mulch would still be available. But the Town would be out of the business of spending tax dollars and staff time to truck multiple tons of mulch to the handful of Vienna families who will ask for it — as long as it’s free.
No change. The U.S. now averages just over 11 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. Up 22% in the past seven days.
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 4/16/2022, 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
Nobody is entirely sure what fraction of cases is being captured by those official counts, what with cheap and plentiful over-the-counter testing and the recent end (I think) of federally-financed free testing for the uninsured.
One way to keep tabs on that is to look at the hospitalization data. I believe that’s captured and reported completely independently of the official counts of positive tests. (Though, of course, a positive result on a hospital-adminstered test will eventually find its way into the official counts of positives). If there are a lot of new cases not captured in the official counts, the count of hospitalizations ought to rise relative to the count of new cases.
That’s not happening. My conclusion is that whatever the undercount of new cases might be, the undercount doesn’t appear to be changing rapidly.
The U.S. now averages a bit over 11 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up more than 25% over the past seven days.
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 4/12/2022, 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
Although case counts are rising, this still doesn’t pose much of a threat to most of us.
Let me work through a bit of arithmetic on that, regarding likelihood of hospitalization for the most at-risk population, the population over age 65.
Taking the most recent data from the CDC COVID data tracker, individuals age 65+ are currently being hospitalized for COVID-19 at a rate of 5.6 per 100K population per week, or under 1 per 100K per day.
If I then take the CDC data on effectiveness of vaccination in that group, and the fraction of that population by vaccination status, here’s what that all implies for the likelihood of hospitalization, per day, by vaccination status.
First, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, the un-vaccinated are a tiny share of the population, but a large share of COVID-19 cases. Among the elderly, those who are less than fully vaccinated accounted for about 10 percent of the population, but nearly 50 percent of COVID-19 admissions for this age group,
Source: Calculated from various data series on the CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 4/15/2022
If I then break that down into the daily chance of being hospitalized, it looks like this:
Source: Calculated from various data series on the CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 4/15/2022
The upshot is that even among the most vulnerable age group, those who have gotten the booster face an average daily risk of hospitalization from COVID of 0.0004%.
To put that in perspective, the 50.4 million Americans age 65 and older account for about 13.2 million hospitalizations in a typical year. Thus, the daily odds of being hospitalized for something, in that age group, is about 0.07%.
Comparing the two, the average elderly resident of the U.S. if vaccinated and boostered, is about 180 times more likely to be hospitalized for something else, than to be hospitalized for COVID-19.
This doesn’t mean that the elderly should throw caution to the winds with regard to COVID-19 hygiene. I just means that, at present levels, COVID-19 adds only the tiniest amount to their pre-existing daily risk of hospitalization.
Probably more telling is the same calculation for the un-vaccinated. For that population, even at the low COVID-19 hospitalization rate that currently exists in the U.S., the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization increases their overall hospitalization risk by a full 5 percent.
In short, for the unvaccinated elderly, the additional risk of COVID-19 hospitalization is roughly comparable to the average daily risk of hospitalization for stroke, in the 65+ population. In the case of COVID in the unvaccinated, it’s not exactly a self-inflicted injury. But it’s not exactly not that, either.
The U.S. stands at just over 10 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 15% in the past seven days. In the Northeast region, cases are rising at a steady 40% per week.
The CDC came out with another month of seroprevalence data. As of January, there was still no evidence of any increase in the number of unreported infections. As of January, that analysis showed 1.9 actual infections for every one that had been reported. That was actually lower than in prior months. Either a) January was too soon to start seeing those missing infections, b) post-infection antibodies fade fast enough that the seroprevalence survey itself is missing the earliest infections now, or c) something else is preventing those infections from showing in the seroprevalence data.
Here are a couple of previous monthly readings, for comparison. More-or-less, the CDC seroprevalence survey has always shown that there were two true infections for every one reported, plus-or-minus.
The U.S. remains at roughly 10 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 10 percent in the past seven days. In the Northeast region, new cases are rising almost 40 percent per week. In the South Atlantic, they are still falling at an average rate of 25 percent per week.
This week, the count of daily new hospitalizations began to rise slightly. It had been falling since the peak of the Omicron wave. This is useful, because it validates that the slight uptick in new case counts is probably real, and not some artifact of data reporting.
Meanwhile, as if the quality of the data weren’t bad enough already — what with home testing displacing officially-tabulated testing, and with the end of “free” (that is, federal-taxpayer-paid) testing in the U.S. — that quality of the official new-case counts continues to deteriorate. Eleven states now report case counts just once or twice a week. The resulting “jump” in the new case count occurring with the weekly reporting make it hard to tell real changes from mere reporting errors. The lags in reporting also mean that the reported data will respond even more sluggishly to any true changes in trend.
What with everybody having decided that this is over, the cumulative increases kind of creep up on you. With this latest round of reporting, Washington DC is now over 40 new cases per 100K per day. A cluster of Northeast states is in the high-20s to low-30s.
