You’ve most likely seen the news reports: nationwide we’re experiencing a spike in Covid-19 confirmed cases, but not — so far — in deaths. We are testing more, but that doesn’t explain the increase in cases. I’ve been looking at the national numbers as well as the California and Monterey County ones. I’ve come to some conclusions, and I’ll highlight them now:
- Nationwide, we are seeing more cases than ever before
- In California, we are seeing far more cases than ever before
- Hospitalization rates are falling.
- Both in California and nationwide, the case fatality rate (CFR) is falling towards 2%.
- The infection fatality rate (IFR) probably about a tenth of that.
- The Monterey County spike in cases has flattened at a high daily rate. It continues to mostly come from Salinas and South County.
Here are the national case numbers:
The gray line is the seven-day moving average, and it is now higher than it has ever been.
Nationwide deaths continue their fall:
Deaths lag cases, so the death numbers probably won’t keep going down. but he CFR keeps falling:
In California, the case spike is scary:
This is not a second wave. In California, there has been no abatement of the first wave, so we’re still in it.
California hospitalizations of confirmed and unconfirmed cases have begun to climb in the past few days, but they are not yet to the rates we saw at the beginning of April:
California testing has risen steadily, and is now approaching 100,000 tests a day.
In spite of the increased number of tests, the positivity rate of the California tests has begun to creep up:
The California CFR is approaching 2%, which is slightly better than the national rate.
In Monterey County, the caseload is staying at about the place it’s been for the last two weeks:
The testing rate was high a few days ago, but has fallen off:
With the result that the positivity rate has only fallen a bit from its recent peak:
The Monterey County CFR is a bit over 1%. That is probably because the case demographics have skewed towards younger victims.
Robert Redford’s announcement today that he expects that the number of infections is about ten times the number of confirmed infections fits with some other data that I’ve seen, although it is higher than what appears to be the consensus. If that is true, the IFR is a tenth of the CFR. That’s the good news. The bad news is that means more than 20 million Americans infected, and we have no hope of containing this disease through case tracking.
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