This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-9-17, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, as well as basic copy-edits, may have been made in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
The covid numbers are a little wonky this week, but the trend is basically good. Wonky bit first. After declining by 9% the week before, this week's numbers are up 3% over last week's. This isn't that big a deviation from the overall pattern, which still basically looks like we're dropping from a peak. I've attached a graph that shows this.
While cases sometimes bounce around a bit depending on testing, one source of data that doesn't tend to have weird little blips in it is new hospital admissions. This is because hospitals report their covid cases extremely consistently, while the case data is skewed here and there by delayed reporting, people feeling like getting their testing more or less at different times, and changes in test availability.
So if we take a look at hospitalizations, then we see a much clearer picture. New hospital admissions are down 6.6% for the week, and have been dropping smoothly since about August 28th. So as far as the spread of the virus, it looks like things are moving in the right direction still.
The one thing that's clearly not moving in the right direction is deaths. We've averaged 1464 deaths per day last week, up from 1253 the week before. But since hospitalizations started dropping around the end of August, and deaths tend to lag about three weeks or so behind actual cases of the virus, if that pattern holds up we should expect deaths to start dropping about ... now. We'll have to check in next week and see if that happened.
Two graphs are attached. Numbers are from the CDC Covid Data Tracker pages.
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