COVID-19 September 17, 2020

It's been almost two weeks since I last posted.  The Labor Day holiday is primarily responsible for the silence.  First, the numbers coming in were rather skewed.  It was clear that testing, labs, and reporting were also respecting the holiday.  Second, I wanted to wait a week so that the holiday was in the rear view mirror and it became possible to better compare week over week numbers.  

 

Daily cases did indeed drop most of last week and have since recovered this week.  Not only have they recovered, but they are starting to rise above the numbers from two weeks ago.  I suspect that new cases are going to at least level off in the next week, and I would not be surprised if they start to rise again.  People are getting weary of quarantine.  Cell phone tracking indicates that people are going out and interacting more and more.  Couple that to the holiday and the return to school and the ingredients are in place for another rise. The death rate is also starting to tick up again and is now on par with the numbers prior to the holiday.  It would not be surprising to see that trend also continue.  

Next week will be key to seeing how holiday interactions and the return to school are impacting the numbers.  I'm not optimistic.

 

  

COVID-19 September 04, 2020

It's been about a week since I last posted.  In that period, the number of daily new cases has nearly leveled off at about 40,000 per day.  It would be interesting to see how much of that is due to the return to school.  There have certainly been a large number of reports of outbreaks at schools and universities.  It's curious, though, that some of these don't seem to be reflected in the individual state numbers.  For example, over a thousand students were supposedly diagnosed at the University of Alabama within the last couple of weeks.  But there is no significant change in that state's trends over the last several weeks.  In fact, Alabama posted a paltry 86 on September 2, which is the lowest since March 31.  Something is amiss.

The death rate continues downward, but the rate of decrease is slowing.  We are now down to about 850 deaths per day.  I expect the deaths to level off in the next week or so given the leveling of new cases.