All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.
The COVID-19 new case count is unchanged at 39 new cases per 100K population per day. Deaths are still running 350 per day. And for reasons unknown, hospitalizations are now up to 6500 a day. Continue reading Post #1564: COVID-19 non-trend to 7/27/2022
The U.S. stands at 39 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, unchanged over the past seven days. Deaths are still running 350 a day or so. Hospitalizations appear to have peaked at just over 6000 a day.
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 7/27/2022, 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
If I smooth out the worst of the holiday-related data reporting artifacts, you can see that this is now the longest “flat” stretch in the U.S. pandemic. The new case rate has been at more-or-less the same level for three months.
As importantly, there’s nothing new on the horizon. Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 together account for 95% of all new COVID-19 cases in the U.S.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 7/27/2022
Recall that the World Health Organization applied the name Omicron to a specific strain of COVID around Thanksgiving 2021. Three quarters of a year later, and nothing new has arisen that merits getting a new Greek letter applied to it.
Source: Greek-alphabets.com
The absence of pi is finally attracting some press coverage. If you skim over that Time article, you’ll see this quote, emphasis mine:
Trevor Bedford, a professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, says ... The evolutionary jump from Delta to Omicron was large, and the virus may not change that dramatically again for years—if ever, ..."
The daily new COVID-19 case count remains at 39 per 100K population. But hospitalizations are now over 6200 a day, per the US CDC. Continue reading Post #1561: COVID-19 trend to 7/22/2022, cases steady, hospitalizations continue to rise
The U.S. stands at 39 new cases per 100K per day, unchanged from a week ago. Continue reading Post #1560: COVID-19 to 7/20/2022, no change; increased hospitalizations driven by the elderly.
The U.S. now stands at 38 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down from a revised 39 from yesterday. Deaths appear to have risen to a steady 350 a day (up from 300 or so for the past couple of months), and hospitalizations for COVID have finally topped 6000 per day. Continue reading Post #1559: COVID-19 to 7/19/2022, now 38/100K/day
New COVID-19 cases jumped up after the July 4th holiday — and appear to have stuck at a new, slightly higher level. For seven straight weeks, the new case rate was 31/100K/day, plus or minus. Now its 40/100K/day, plus or minus. Continue reading Post #1558: COVID trend to 7/18/2022, 40 new cases per 100K and holding
We’re now at 40 new cases per 100K population per day. That’s up 20% in the past seven days. No clue whether or not that’s the start of a trend, but it’s definitely different from the past seven weeks.
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 7/15/2022, 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
Still no end in sight for rising hospitalizations. The most recent number from the CDC is 5850 new hospitalizations a day, up another hundred from yesterday. So, we are slowly closing in on 6000 per day. I still have no way to reconcile that rising hospitalization number with the flat case and death count.
You (probably don’t) recall that I reviewed what evidence there was regarding “long COVID” and decided that it just wasn’t a threat worth worrying about. That’s Post #1524, Finally cracking the numbers on the supposedly vast number of long COVID cases, Posted on May 31, 2022.
I don’t doubt that long COVID exists. Heck, long flu is known to exist. What I doubt is that serious long COVID is extremely common, as many studies (and associated screaming headlines) have implied.
It’s nowhere near as common or commonly serious as implied because a) the overwhelming majority of those with long COVID only report vague non-life-threatening symptoms (fatigue, anxiety), b) there’s typically no control group, so you don’t know what fraction of just-everybody-on-the-street would report the same thing, and c) upon examination, some key studies actually turn out not to be studies of individuals with COVID, but studies of individuals who ended up hospitalized for COVID.
That makes the preliminary results from a new CDC study kind of interesting.
I say “new”, because I just stumbled across it on the CDC COVID data tracker. It has actually being going on for more than a year and a half now. I strongly suspect that the reason I haven’t heard about it before is that it isn’t showing some huge-and-spectacular prevalence of long COVID.
This is a prospective study funded by CDC, taking individuals who had COVID-19 symptoms, got tested for COVID, and then either did or didn’t test positive. The CDC then tracks the presence of serious symptoms for months afterwards, contrasting the rate of such symptoms among those with and (presumably) without COVID-19.
You can find the CDC writeup on this CDC web page, along with links to all the detail.
But here’s my quick takeaway. Look at the two charts below, and focus on the orange bars. That’s the fraction of individuals who still have some type of symptom (within each group of symptoms) one year after they either did or didn’t have COVID-19.
Source: Adapted from CDC COVID data tracker.
So, top graph or bottom graph? Which group is the one that had COVID? Which group is the one that didn’t have COVID?
At the minimum, it’s damned hard to guess, isn’t it? This, by itself, tells you that tales of common and severe long COVID are nonsense. Long COVID surely exists, but it’s not the omnipresent menace that has been pushed by the popular press. If it were, the COVID chart would clearly show higher rates of symptoms one year out.
In fact, for a truly randomly chosen individual — the only criterion here is that they felt sick enough to ask for a test — it’s hard to tell the rate of long-term symptoms in the COVID population from the rate of symptoms in a population that didn’t have COVID.
The only visual clue above is the blue bars — the rate of symptoms at the time they asked for a test. The COVID population is the one with the extra-long blue bars. They did, in fact, on average, feel worse at time of testing than did the population that turned out not to have COVID.
I’m sticking with my earlier conclusion. I’m just not going to worry about long COVID. I worry (maybe) about getting a case so severe I’d get hospitalized. Which, in and of itself, would greatly increase my odds of some long-term symptoms.
But just your garden-variety infection, not requiring medical intervention? I just don’t think the odds of having debilitating symptoms, from that, are high enough to add materially to my overall risk from COVID.
The US now stands at 39 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up about 20% in the past seven days. I can no longer blame the uptick on July 4th data reporting. So this appears to push the U.S. up above the level of daily new cases that has prevailed since late May of this year. Continue reading Post #1556: COVID-19 trend, cases up, can’t blame it on July 4th
The U.S. now stands at 41 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day. Basically, it’s still at the level that showed up yesterday, due to July 4th data reporting issues.
I think we’re still looking at July 4th data reporting issues. For several large states (e.g., California), I can see that what was routinely a large count of cases reported on a Tuesday because a large count of cases reported on Wednesday, following July 4th.
So even though this is not what I expected to see, at all, I’m still not ready to suggest that there’s some new wave of cases building. That may or may not be true. We may or may not be on an upward trend.. Even if so, I don’t think it’s anything near as sharp an upturn as today’s count suggests. At least some of what showed up today is an artifact of delayed data reporting following the July 4th weekend.
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 7/13/2022, 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
Give it one more day for the data reporting issues to settle out.
That said, the CDC now shows that new COVID-19 hospitalization now top 5600 per day. It was not all that long ago that they topped 5000. So there’s a long and strong upward trend in COVID-19 hospitalizations that seems to be getting next-to-no attention. And for sure, is getting no formal explanation.
Finally, BA.5 now accounts for two-thirds of new cases. Together, BA.5 and BA.4 account for 80% or so. My conclusion is that whatever this change in variants is going to do, it should already have done it.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
On paper, the U.S. number jumped to 40 new cases per 100K per day with today’s data reporting, up from the low 30’s just previous. In practice, most of that is just the echo of the July 4th holiday’s impact on data report. We’ll know more tomorrow. Continue reading Post #1554: COVID-19 to 7/11/2022, still working through July 4th data reporting issues
