Covid: Just to Keep Things Spicy

Deaths per week in the United States (source):

wk ending July 4: 3,425
wk ending July 11: 4,610 (35% increase over previous wk)
wk ending July 18: 5,163 (12% increase over previous wk)
wk ending July 25: 6,261 (21% increase over previous wk)

I'm not at all interested in how the rate per testing is going up or down, or other similar arguments, because those are meaningless statistical arguments as far as is covid getting better or worse. Testing is increasing and there was inadequate testing previously, so of course we will see a drop in rates of deaths per population or things like that.

My measure is--are more people dying from covid or not? That puts the discussion where it should be--the effect covid is having on actual people--and not some silly statistical argument.

At least for now, it is getting worse considering the country as a whole.

Approximately 136,000 deaths from covid in the United States so far this year, and it is still going crazy in certain states.

For comparison, since 2010, influenza has killed between 12,000 and 61,000 people per year according to the CDC (it averages around 30,000 per year). Covid is not the flu. It's more than twice as bad as the worst flu in the last decade--so far--in terms of deaths.

And we still have five months left to go in the year.

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Pricknick's picture

It's going away. Or not. Just like other unwanted visitors.
Date and time to be realized when it happens.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

@Pricknick @Pricknick

it will go away. Just don't want people to let their guard down prematurely (although tons of folks are . . .).

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Pricknick's picture

@apenultimate
because mother nature likely has several nasty goodies buried in ancient permafrost.
Humans are not imune to multi million year old bugs.
"The Thing" comes to mind.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

disrael's picture

@apenultimate - I don't think we should require someone die in order to be counted in the stats. Hospitalization should be enough because even if no one were dying avoiding a major, hospitalized illness would be enough to drive mitigation behavior.

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@disrael by any state?

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@disrael

but, I don't know of those data being aggregated anywhere.

In general, I've seen hospitalization data being loosely similar in trending to death data (at least at my local area)--except with a time shifting (hospitalizations might trend upwards 3 or 4 weeks before death data do). So, I don't think it'd be much different in the end.

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Bisbonian's picture

@apenultimate , I saw a statistic that 80% of people admitted to the hospital for COVID, died. Another 10-15% had serious organ damage (I saw a photo of a man who lost all of his fingers, recently).

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

OzoneTom's picture

@Bisbonian

"One of the JAMA Cardiology studies found that, among 100 adults who recently recovered from Covid, 78% showed some type of cardiac involvement in MRI scans and 60% had ongoing inflammation in the heart."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-and-the-heart-two-new-...

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(per Worldometers -- a better source than CDC/HHS but some counties or states may be manipulating their numbers).

Agree that the number of tests is fairly meaningless for several reasons (and doubt that few agree with me on this point). Far too many people with no symptoms and no contact with an infected person are being tested and surprise, surprise, they test negative. Then there is some unknown number of people like Trump who for unknown reasons are tested daily. This leads to irresponsible behavior like that of Robert O'Brien, WH NSC official.

Of course, there are too few primary health care professionals to assess patients that may be infected and manage the care of those that are infected regardless of the severity of their illness, and too few public health professionals to perform contact tracing and isolate index cases. Limiting the number infected with the virus, not only reduces the the number of deaths but also limits morbidity that remains unclear at this time but could be more serious than current deaths. Study: Three-quarters of Adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after recovery

...
The 100 study participants, 45 to 53 years old, had recovered from COVID-19. Participants' underwent MRI evaluation two to three months after being diagnosed with the virus, researchers said. ...
...
Two-thirds of the participants recovered from COVID-19 at home, and 18% never had symptoms of the virus, the researchers said. Roughly half had mild to moderate symptoms of the coronavirus, they said.

Future sudden, fatal heart attacks built in?

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12 users have voted.

The first one is deaths per million. That tells you how well/poor your country has done to date. The worst countries are in Western European and peaked earlier.
Belgium = 847 Deaths per Million
UK = 674
Spain = 608
Italy = 581
Sweden = 564
France = 462
USA = 453

Notice that the US is not the worst, yet. But it's climbing fast as the other countries have flattened the curve and decreased their rate per day of deaths. I expect the US to be #1 fairly soon.

And along with that I also like to look at the number of active infections per million. That tells you about potential contagion rate, these are the people emitting covid 19 viruses.

USA = 6,440 Active infections per million people
Bolivia = 3,861
Belgium = 3,317
Brazil = 3,279
Peru = 2,991
South Africa = 2,942

and for reference:
France = 1,069
Italy = 209

It looks like the next hot spots are South America and Africa, and the US continues to be the hottest of the hot spots.

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Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.

@The Wizard

These are good methods to compare countries to one another because it essentially normalizes the population of different countries (whereas straight death or case counts do not).

I wonder if this could be done (or has been done) for individual US states . . .

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Bisbonian's picture

@apenultimate : https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ That page has four graphs. Top two are raw data (Countries, and states), and the bottom two are normalized by population. (I got a great screen grab showing how AZ is doing, but with my trickle of internet signal, I can't upload a photo.)

Just ask if you need help finding something in particular...this is my go-to site, when I want to check. I find that "New Cases" and "New Deaths", both using a rolling 1 week average, give the best visualizations. The site will do lots of other comparisons, playing with the menus below the graph.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

Bisbonian's picture

@Bisbonian you might take it all with a grain of salt: https://scontent-fml2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/116739523_2978991732328353...

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

edg's picture

@Bisbonian

It's a good thing HHS stepped in to fix the data. /snark

BTW, had breakfast at Bisbee Breakfast Club. They're expanding pretty fast, just opened a 2nd location here in Marana.

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Bisbonian's picture

@edg Original creators of the BBC, now live in Marana, too. Quietly.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

@apenultimate is covered by World o Meters. It also includes active cases by states but you'll have to calculate active/1M pop.

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@The Wizard be more accurately reported. Active cases/1M pop are a bit dodgy. S. Korea claims that recovery is based on two negative tests at least 24 hours apart. As they have been managing infections since 21 Jan, have had adequate testing resources available since early on, and haven't had a spike in infections beyond their medical resources, their numbers are likely very good. Suspect that many other countries aren't doing that and recovery is more a matter of two weeks from testing positive and not hospitalized or dead. Some countries, such as Germany, are reporting nice neat round numbers for recovered and cases move to that status quickly compared to what other countries report. I seriously doubt that Brazil has confirmed 1.7 million recovered and India 1 million recovered. (Russia's and a few other countries reports on recovered also look to be too high.)

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