Is the pandemic ending?

This post is updated daily with new data — today’s is 31 December.

Addendum 30 December — nothing like new data to make you change your mind. Going from 2005 hospitalized COVID19 cases 25 Dec to 2,963 on 29 December in FLorida is a significant surge.  The fat lady hasn’t sung in Massachusetts, New York or Florida.  The pandemic is surging where it counts — hospitalized COVID19 patients.

 

I hope I’m not doing what I’ve seen many times, a devoted family hovering over a brain dead patient seeing signs of life when none exists because they desperately want to. Who can blame them?  They’re human beings not rational automatons.  Nonetheless, there are two signs that the pandemic is actually ending.

First, some background.  The media endlessly trumpets surges in ‘cases’.   Here’s the latest from Massachusetts — https://www.wwlp.com/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-surge-in-mass-continues-to-cancel-news-years-eve-celebrations/.

Remember a case is defined as finding the virus (in the form of a viral protein or the viral genome) in your respiratory passages.  It does NOT mean you are sick

Nonetheless, there are two signs that the pandemic is actually ending.

First from Massachusetts, where ‘we believe’ in science and the adults in the room are in charge.  There is no question that the number of cases has dramatically increased in the past month — follow the following link to an excellent site which allows you to click and explore

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting#covid-19-interactive-data-dashboard-

If you click on various points of the curve you’ll see that a month ago the state had 750 people in the hospital with COVID19. On 23 December there were 1,595 — surge enough for anyone.

As someone well over 60 and being fully vaccinated (Pfizer) with a booster 9/21 I’me very interested in how many breakthrough infections in fully vaccinated people there are — it was 503/1595 on 23 December 31.5% hardly trivial.They don’t give an age distribution of breakthroughs at various ages, but based on past experience, it’s likely to be highest in the Medicare set.

I’ve been watching the site for the past few days and here are the numbers.  Date stands for the date of the report, and includes all data up to and including the previous day — Total cases is really total cases of COVID19 in hospital.

Date       Total cases   Fully vaccinated   % fully vaccinated

21 Dec      1,621            470                       29%

22 Dec     1,632            500                      31%

23 Dec     1,595           503                       31%

Addendum 27 Dec

27 Dec       1,636         509                       31%  — essentially the same

Addendum 28 Dec

28 Dec      1,707         529                          31%

Addendum 29 Dec

29 Dec       1,711         572                          33%

Addendum 30 Dec

30 Dec       1,817       631                            35%

Addendum 31 Dec

31 Dec         1,954     686                           35%

Not stable or decreasing — 1817 is 14% increase from a week ago 23 Dec.  Note that the percentage of the fully vaccinated is increasing.  Certainly no longer the pandemic of the unvaccinated. Florida jumped 10% today (see below) which shows why you’ve got to get figures each day and look at trends

I plan on daily updates for the rest of the week.  Things look quite stable in Massachusetts — not so much in Florida

Addendum 29 Dec — the statistics in New York State are nowhere as good — https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary

On 21 Dec there were 4200 or so COVID cases in hospital in New York State — as of the 28th there are around 6600.

Now both New York State and Florida both have about 20 million people, yet Florida’s case load today of 2560 is only 38% that of Florida ! !  A smart friend thinks this is due to the far greater population density in NY (particularly in New York City).  Perhaps, but there has been a huge amount of criticism in the New York Times and other elements of the mainstream press of Florida and its Governor for they way they’ve been lax about masking, school closures, and social distancing.

Addendum 30 Dec

Comparing Florida and New York again.  Florida has a population of 21,480,00 and 62.390 deaths.  New York has a population of 19,450,00 and 58,560 deaths.   So Florida has 2% more death per capita.  Much closer than I had been led to believe by the press which basically called Governor DeSantis a murderer due to his unmasking policy.  Well, maybe he is, but then so is former Governor Cuomo for sending recovered COVID19 nursing home patients back to the nursing to infect the vulnerable

The numbers in Massachusetts are pretty stable and large enough to be significant. Now maybe this is seeing signs of life where none exist due to lags in reporting due to the Christmas holiday etc. etc.   But if it isn’t, it is good news.  I await next week’s numbers with great interest.

Addendum 30 Dec — Well it was wishful thinking.

Second — the data from Florida as of 26 December– according to the New York Times — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/florida-covid-cases.html

There are 4 graphs, a big one on the top of ‘cases’ from March 2020 to the present.  You can click on it at any point and see how many new ‘cases’ there were that day.

In case you can’t, here are a few numbers.

Date                 new cases

24 December  31,683

23 November   1,605

Certainly, surge enough for anyone.

Now  below this there are 3 more graphs (but each is shrunk down to 1/3 the size of the top one to fit).  They are from left — number of tests, number hospitalized, and number of deaths.

Note the left most — the number of tests increases in December about the same way the number of cases does  — so although there is a surge, it may be due (in part) to increased testing.

Note the two right most graphs — hospitalizations and deaths.  They don’t really budge in December.

In particular the deaths appear to have declined.  Again a caveat about the reporting accuracy over the Christmas holiday.

Also note that Florida with a population of 20 million or so had only 2,005 COVID19 patients in hospital on Christmas day, while Massachusetts withs 6.7 million had 1,505.  So what has Florida done that we’re not doing up here?

Addendum 27 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 26 December was 2129 a 6% increase from 25 December.

Addendum 28 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 27 Dec  2228 another 5% increase

Addendum 29 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 28 Dec 2,560 — a big increase

Addendum 30 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 29 December is 2,963 — another big increase

Addendum  31 December — the number of COVID19 cases in hospital in Florida 30 December is 3,376

I should have reported the number of deaths earlier, but didn’t, but I will start now.  It is given daily by the NYT, but the graph of deaths isn’t interactive and you can’t pick these numbers from it

There were 22 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 26th.

There were 18 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 27th

There were 16 COVID19 death in Florida on the 28th — increase sure to follow the increase in COVID19 cases in hospital

There were 16 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 29th — increases sure to follow

There were 19 COVID19 deaths in Florida on the 30th  — increases sure to follow

I plan on daily updates for the rest of the week, so you’ll be able to draw your own conclusions.  Look at the third graph in the second line, it doesn’t look like deaths are surging.

But if accurate, the conclusion is inescapable — the currently extant virus variant (omicron) simply is NOT putting people in the hospital the way the earlier surges did.  Again have a look at the preceding 3 bumps in hospitalization for COVID19 since March 2020, and note how they parallel the number of cases.

Addendum 30 December — nothing like new data to make you change your mind. Going from 2005 hospitalized COVID19 cases 25 Dec to 2,963 on 29 December in FLorida is a significant surge.  The fat lady hasn’t sung in Massachusetts, New York or Florida.  The pandemic is surging where it counts — hospitalized COVID19 patients.

It is thought that the omicron variant accounts for over 50% of new infections no matter where you are, and over 90% in the NY metropolitan area.  So the surge in the new variant may actually be a good thing in that it is replacing delta (the previous dominant variant), a more virulent form of the virus, by a more innocuous one,.

Stay tuned and relax a bit.

Yet another Addendum 29 December (if you can stand it)— yesterday the CDC said that it had overestimated the prevalence of omicron — According to agency data, omicron accounted for about 59 percent of all U.S. infections as of Dec. 25. Previously, the CDC said the omicron variant comprised 73 percent of all cases for the week ending Dec. 18. But that number has now been revised to 22.5 percent of all cases.– https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions

So that means that omicron deaths won’t be as large as the initial prevalences given by the CDC implied. Revisions of data are common and unavoidable in a fluid situation like this.

Reasoning about data as it comes in is exactly what scientists do.  I love doing this. Any guesses as to what tomorrow will bring?