US COVID Update (19-06-2020)

You'll have to excuse any small mistakes I think. I spent over an hour having a molar 'extracted' today. Actually, it wasn't extracted so much as it was hammered, drilled, split into 3 parts and then each piece was dug out in pieces. I don't feel bad but I am a bit irritable right now.

But since it's Friday I think the most recent data is more reliable than what we had over the weekend and through Tuesday or so.

Despite the news reports, the course of the “bad parts” of the epidemic continues to trend downward. The 7 day MA of new deaths today reached its lowest number since April 2. While hospitalizations and use of ICU units are up a bit in localized areas like parts of Florida the overall general trend is down.

Florida got some attention today by highlighting a minor increase in hospitalizations to ICU in the Miami area. At the same time new deaths in FL were down. And FL has a bigger population than NY yet only 1/10 as many deaths. After weeks of 'suggesting' that the whole US would begin to look like the NYC area the media is now reduced to 'suggesting' that small increases in new cases (in a huge increase in tests) portend a second wave. Heck, we're not really out of any first wave yet.

We are now averaging nearly a half million tests a day. We've now done just over 25M tests. But the % testing positive has declined from over 15% 2 months ago to 5% now. And many of the new positives are of younger people who are only getting tested because their employers are requiring it. That means that most of the time they are either asymptomatic or have extremely mild cases.

The 7 day average new deaths/per day has been under 600 for the past week. The 7day MA has been in a fairly straight line decline since it peaked on April 21 at 14,200. It is now at just under 4300. That is a decline of just over 70% in not quite 2 months. Some media were pushing a 'prediction of 3000 new deaths per day by the end of June. That looks really unlikely.

There has been a small increase in new cases in the Southwest border area that is driven by American citizens (and others) leaving Mexico to seek testing and/or treatment in the US. Mexico is now having their own epidemic, and they aren't very well equipped to handle it.

Has anyone heard about any ventilator shortages recently? That was a big deal 2 months ago. Now we are shipping them to other counties, frequently for free. We were stressed in some areas of some states but never overwhelmed.

Basically, in all the ways that really count, new deaths per day, new hospitalizations per day, Admittance to ICU, and being put on a ventilator, we are down more than 2/3 nationwide since the peak. Spin it how you try, we're not nearly in even a similar situation.

Meanwhile, if either opening a state or “peaceful protesting” were going to create a new spike in cases it should have shown up by now, and in known places within states. So far the 'spikes' have not happened in those places. Meanwhile the more locked down states are not seeing as rapid decreases in the bad effects as the more open states.

One good way to look at that is to look at the deaths per million population in the larger population states. Four states have more than 1000 deaths/1M. NY at 1596, NJ at 1451, CT (not really a high population state, but really should be regarded as part of NY in this case) at 1183, and MA at 1122. MI at 604, IL at 512, and PA at 499 are next among big states. GA 243 FL 141, CA 134, NC 113, TX 73 are have much, much lower rates. The US median (the best measure of central tendency for this data) is 152.5. The big states with the worst rates are from 2 to 10 times above the median while the big states with the lowest rates are all but one below the median, and TX is well below the median.

Remember what I said back in late March and early April. The worst hit states tend to be those with (or very near, like CT) a single large metro area, have mass transit systems, have a higher frequency of multi-generational households, and sent elderly COVID patients to unprepared nursing homes. The 3 of those variables are societal in nature. The last is totally political. Of the low death rate states only CA sent the elderly COVID patients to unprepared nursing homes. Of the high death rates, at least 6 forced unprepared nursing homes to take COVID states. I leave as an exercise any other variables the high death rate states share.

Anyway, now would be a great time to start thinking about what we have truly learned and what we can do when the second wave really starts (probably in the late Fall, if there is one), but I don't see much of that happening yet. Too many are too busy trying to lay the blame on someone besides themselves. Too bad. That means more will die who don't have to, probably.

The governors of particularly NY, NJ, MA, MI, and IL should be getting severely castigated for their policies. It's not happening in the media and probably won't. Gov Cuomo's policies are arguably responsible for 10,000 deaths in NY and he barely gets questioned about it.

Ah well. The “experts” turned out not to be so expert, so perhaps we should take with a heaping spoonful of salt anything they say next time. Or perhaps just ignore them. Or maybe do the opposite of whatever they say. I hardly see how we could do worse.