What the Coronavirus numbers are telling us

American Thinker ^ | 07/21/2020 | Richard Baehr

[SeekAndFind]

There are lots of numbers flying around about the coronavirus, so here is a brief attempt to put some context to them.

The United States daily new case volume rose to the mid 30,000 range in April, then started a slide to about half that level in mid-May. Since then, there has been a steep rise, to the mid 70,0000 level last week, down a bit this weekend to the low 60,000 level. The distribution of cases among the states has also changed.

In the first surge, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana were hardest hit. In the last 6-7 weeks, Florida, California, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, and a few other states in the southeast have had the highest volumes, though a large number of states have rising numbers.

The fear surrounding the virus is, of course, most associated with its death toll. The daily number of new deaths reported is far lower now, even with the much higher daily new case levels, than at the peak of daily deaths two to three months ago. Daily deaths were regularly in the 2,000 range or higher, reaching 2,500 per day, and dropped to the 500-750 per day range in June. They are up a bit now to close to 1,000 on some days, with higher death tolls in the most severely hit states, likely to increase more since there is a lag between positive testing results and deaths associated with the new cases.

This country has the highest caseload in the world, and one of the highest caseloads in the world compared to population. But as far as deaths, many countries have higher death rates per million people than we do.

[Morpheus2009]

Remember we need to be denied medicine that poor countries are using to recover, such as India.

[Red Badger]

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

[IndispensableDestiny]

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. We are seeing infections in parts of the country that got by in the spring. The Wuhan virus arrived in force later than it did in the northeast and other places. We are better at testing now, so we are missing fewer infections.

If you go the the IHME COVID page for the US (yeah, I know their predictive modeling was a mess), look at "Daily infections and testing" and then just the estimated infections. These are modeled, not confirmed by testing which wasn't all that extensive in the spring.

Their model shows 250,000 people got infected on the peak day! The confirmed cases for that day were around 21,000. So, perhaps we were only catching one tenth of infections in the spring.

Folks are confused why deaths are not "keeping up" with confirmed cases. It's probably because we missed most infections early on.

[antidemoncrat]

Are the COVID-19 numbers accurate or has the healthcare system been politicized.

[MattMusson]

When Testing was scarce - only sick people were tested.

When you only test sick people - the mortality rate is going to be greater.

When Testing became common - many well or just marginally sick were tested. This increased the number of positives. But, it dramatically decreased the mortality rate.