(10/17/20) Covid-19 is accelerating again worldwide with Spain now heading toward a world leading death rate. California is improving but Orange County deaths are going up while hospitalizations are going down. What’s up with that?
Snapshot
Here again are the tables of per capita cumulative deaths and weekly death rates as indicators of total magnitude and current severity, respectively, of the epidemic in various populations ranging from local to international. Spain and Iran have now surpassed the U.S. for deadliest major countries. Orange County is now rivaling the worst death rates in the world.
Here are the latest death rate plots for the U.S. and CA.
The main observations are:
- The U.S. has now passed U.K. since our last update leaving only Spain as having a higher per capita death total of all major European nations.
- Around the world, the currently deadliest nations are: Iran, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, U.S., India, France, Columbia, Peru, U.K, Russia
- FL far exceeds any other U.S. state for deadliness, with LA and TX also still deadlier than Brazil. New flareups are occurring in IL, GA, PA,
- The U.S. and CA showed a death rate decline from their second outbreak, but are showing some signs of a new flareup. Hopefully this is not the dreaded Fall virus surge.
The Local Scene
Below are hospitalization and death rate plots for Los Angeles County (LAC) and Orange County (OC).
Over the last two months we noted a disparity in which a distinct and significant decline in hospitalizations was not followed by a decline in death rate despite being well passed the expected 1-2 week lag. The plots below show that LAC is now exhibiting expected behavior in terms of a real decline in hospitalizations being manifested by a similar (but 1-2 week delay) decline in death rate. However, this behavior is not observed for OC where in fact there is a disturbing anomaly. This anomaly is very evident when we plot death rate vs. hospitalizations 10 days prior for all hospitalizations and ICU.
These plots show LAC having a relatively constant death rate of about 1-2% for all and 6-8% for ICU hospitalizations. OC on the other hand started out with similar numbers, but have lately risen erratically to current values of 6% and 21%, respectively, or about 3x greater than for LAC. I have searched for an explanation to no avail. I can only speculate that (i) OC is minimizing hospital durations, which would reduce daily hospitalization counts, (ii) undercounting of deaths are now being reconciled at later dates, (iii) numbers are being fudged! While (i) and (ii) may hold for short periods of time it is unlikely to explain a greater than a month long trend. I won’t touch (iii) at this point. Very peculiar, but if deaths is the statistic that most matters, then OC is currently one of the deadliest places on earth.
To further explore this anomaly, we plot number of new cases in LAC and OC, a statistic we shunned in the past because of inadequate testing, but now has some usefulness since testing is now relatively stable if not widespread.
Interestingly OC does not show abnormal behavior relative to LAC in the case rate plots. Both counties are showing slightly rising case numbers, but nothing alarming other than it means death rates may not come down much and may even increase in the future. So, the outsized OC death rate statistics remain a mystery.
The Nation
I am sure you are getting just as numb as I am. Four weeks later and another 20,000 American deaths; ho hum. Why are people so resistant to masks? This reminds me of the early days of seat belts where we heard every lame reason for not wearing them. Well they got mandated and guess what. Everyone uses them and it saves lives. So, don’t give me lame reasons about not wearing masks. They are not perfect, but they dramatically help. Even if they are just 70% efficient in reducing transmission then we get R0 below 1 and the coronavirus goes away. This is the same as achieving herd immunity. Dah!!!
In case we are becoming desensitized to the number of Covid-19 deaths that continue to afflict Americans let me present to you this gruesome table that starkly puts it in perspective.
Let me explain. The current death rate due to Covid-19 currently is equivalent to a plane crash every quarter of a day (i.e., 4 crashes per day), a Pearl Harbor every 2.7 days and a 9-11 every 3.4 days. And we just sit around as a country doing practically nothing. Yes, there will be vaccines widely available sometime mid next year, which leaves us with about 150,000 more deaths to go if we do nothing else!
After what we might call a second wave that afflicted many states that were not part of the first wave in the northeast, there are new signs of a third wave almost everywhere in the U.S. These new waves do come after periods of remission and we have seen that across most of the country, but this second wave has seen only a very shallow remission and maybe better called steady state like in CA. FL far exceeds any other U.S. state for deadliness, with LA and TX also still deadlier than Brazil. New flareups are occurring in IL, GA and PA. FL also leads in rate of increase of new cases followed by CT. 27 other states are seeing caseloads rising by 10-50% according to the New York Times and CNN.
International
Around the world, the currently deadliest nations are: Iran, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, U.S., India, France, Columbia, Peru, U.K, Russia. We show plots of death rates for some of these to exemplify how conditions can recover and then spiral out of control. Unfortunately, France and the U.K are beginning to look like Spain in seeing a major resurgence. Overall, the WW death rate is not declining.
