This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-9-3, 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 data is a little bit odd this week. Not tremendously, but a little bit odd. Cases were up 2.7% -- a smaller increase than the 3.7%, but not yet a clear peak. Filling out the weekly growth rates since July 8th, the pattern is still moving toward the right direction: 70%, 58%, 52%, 39%, 20%, 12%, 3.7%, and finally 2.7%. The case rates look like we're about to hit the peak.
But hospitalizations, on the other hand, were down 1.9%, as if we have just recently hit a peak and are already on the way down.
Since it's a small thing, and I prefer to wait and see over multiple weeks rather than trying too hard to analyze any one week too hard, I haven't looked into it. But there's at least three possibiltiies, maybe more:
(1) Because we know hospitals record everything daily, while tests often get reported several days late, maybe the real peak has already happened, and we're just not seeing it yet because there's too much old data from before the peak in the case numbers.
(2) Maybe we just increased the amount of tests we're doing. The real peak has already hit, but we're just finding more cases because we're doing a little bit better at testing.
(3) Maybe everything was heading toward a regular peak, but we've been hit by a little spike in schoolchildren testing positive as schools start up. Because children are much less likely than adults to be hospitalized, maybe the bump in child cases is showing up in the cases but not the hospitalization numbers.
In any case, with the exception of the small and slightly odd discrepancy between the cases and hospitalization directions, things are more or less playing out like we would expect from past weeks. Deaths are running a bit above 1,000 per day. One way to look at that is that we're having 2/3 of the cases we did in the winter, but only 1/3 as many deaths.
So things still aren't all resolved, but we continue the see the growth rate levelling off -- it's down about 95% over the last eight weeks.
The numbers, as usual are from the CDC's Covid Tracking pages.
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