The completely preventable “delta wave” is here
Coronavirus dashboard for July 12: the completely preventable “delta wave” is here
The completely unnecessary and preventable “delta wave” of COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths is now in force – all three metrics are now rising nationwide.
Here are the 7 day average of confirmed cases (thin line) and deaths (thick):
Cases have gone up roughly 50% from their 11,300 troughs 3 weeks ago. Deaths likely bottomed 7 days ago.
Hospitalizations (graph from the CDC) have also started rising in the past week or so:
There are July 4 artifacts in almost all the new data, which won’t pass out of the 7 day averages for several more days. Also, about half of the States have apparently decided that COVID is so “over” that they no longer need to report on the weekends.
With those caveats, here are a few graphs of the worst-affected States.
Here are Arkansas, Missouri, and Nevada:
And here they are for spring and summer 2020 for comparison:
Arkansas and Missouri have already matched their worst summer 2020 levels. Nevada is at less than half of its worst levels.
Next, here are Florida and Arizona, both of which had the worst summer outbreaks last year:
Here they are for comparison last year:
Florida is currently only at a little over 1/4 of its worst level from 2020, and Arizona is at about 1/6th of last year’s worst levels.
I expect the situation for all of the above States, except possibly Arizona, to change considerably for the worse before the end of this month.
All of which was completely preventable.
The stupid, it burns.
“A stark partisan divide over the virus has emerged: a Gallup poll last week found that 57% of Republicans say the pandemic is over, compared with 4% of Democrats.”
https://fortune.com/2021/07/07/delta-variant-midwest-trump-country-rejects-vaccines/
The reality is that for a very high percentage of people contracting COVID in the United States, it is an alternate path to (non-permanent) immunity. So in 10 days nearly all of them will be full of antibodies just like public health officials want them to be. Sad there is no crystal ball that can figure out the <1% who are making a bad choice here, but apart from those clearly in high-risk medical conditions there is not much to go on.
4 percent of Democrats don’t know what’s what.
52 percent of Republicans are vaccinated. Add 4 percent for the totally clueless and you are right on the number who think the epidemic is over. I suggest that for vaccinated Republicans, it is the right of the other 48 percent to choose to take the risk. If it is voluntary, how can it be an epidemic? Distorted, but oddly self-consistent.
It is quite possible that Republicans and Democrats are not thinking about the question in the same way. If Democrats are possibly inclined to think “yes, there is still coronavirus in circulation” then the pandemic is not over (and probably won’t be for decades). If Republicans are thinking “Am I through with masks except at the airport or on the airplane, is the marina back open, can I go to my favorite restaurant without just takeaway, can I go to the Cubs game even if they sell 30,000 tickets?” then they are inclined to think that the pandemic is sort of over. Yeah, you can still get it if you choose not to vax up, but my life is so close to pre-pandemic that might as well call it pandemic over.
some of this might be because in some parts of states (personally i know that parts of Texas, have no doctors in their county, and the nearest one is one or more counties over, and there are no other doctors, or pharmacies, etc to stand in for the docs).
While true and a concern for residents in such places, this is the case in exceptionally lightly populated areas almost exclusively. There is almost no possible way that a state such as Texas with huge cities and equally huge suburbs would see much influence in statewide data. Much more puzzling would be states like Alabama where even the “remote” places in the state are very likely within 30 minutes of one or more vaccine providers. I know Kentucky pretty well and despite the idea of remote valleys far from service providers, the number of people who could not get to a vaccine site tomorrow if they expressed interest in it today to their doctor, dentist, local sheriff, pastor, school principal is very close to zero. In Alaska which has to be almost the definition of remote, all medical services have to be provided in this environment and practices of doing so were already in place. There probably are such people and figuring out how to serve them is important, but it likely has next to no impact on aggregate data.
“52 percent of Republicans are vaccinated”
Any proof of that claim?
In IL I can look at vaccination rates of different counties and know who that county voted for in the election.
I took the first number I got in a google search. 52 percent.
I would be interested to see if Republican vaccination rates are higher in blue states. Do self-identified Republicans conform more if they are not in the majority?
Has anyone been keeping a relative red/blue death tally? The blue states, NY, NJ, WA, CA got slammed early, but they decided to fight the disease. The red states took an inshallah approach, whatever Allah decided to do, and took the hit. Americans are supposed to be fighters, but that seems to be the blue states.
Kaleberg, here is the data for every US state, including deaths per million population:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
i’ll let you figure out which states are red or blue…
The problem with the state-wide data is that it elides the differences in (a) local vaccination rates and (b) party affiliations in cities vs. rural areas. For example, the vaccination rates are higher in St. Louis City (which is bluer than outstate MO) than in Southern Missouri (Branson, the Ozarks, which is Trump country).
i don’t follow this red/blue stuff very closely, but i gather that Massachusetts is among the bluest states, and the 7 day average of their new Covid cases is up 179% over the past 15 days; furthermore:
WHDH 7News Boston: 79 fully vaccinated Mass. residents have died from breakthrough COVID-19 infections, data shows. (WHDH) – Of the more than 5,000 Massachusetts residents who have died from COVID-19 since vaccinations became available, 79 of them had been fully vaccinated against the virus, new public health data indicated..
can y’all explain that?
@rjs,
79 deaths out of 4,195,844 vaccinated individuals is considered very low. Without knowing more about the ages and health of these 79, it’s impossible to provide a useful explanation for these rare cases.
this morning they’ve got us up 67% week over week, joining the basket cases of brazil, indonesia, india and the UK in the top 5 for new infections…
i dunno. I never found statistics particularly useful, though two universities graciously allowed me to teach it to undergraduates. When i was in the real world I found a rigorous analysis of my particular measurement job and a careful calibration of my instruments, including knowing exactly the size of error i might reasonably expect…got me results an order of magnitude better than my colleagues who relied on statistics to tell them the “most probable” answer.
in this case, i suspet there is more hope for the Biden door-to-door approach. yes, divided among counties for ease of administration, and looking at results (statistics?) for clues to causes. but enerally getting doctors and preachers and teachers and county health officials… to talk to people and convince them the vaccines are less dangerous than the Covid… will do more good than a thousand intellectuals talking about graphs and political “identity”.
not that charging a few “entertainers” on Fox News with treason wouldn’t be a fun and useful exercise.
79 deaths out of 4 million served is indeed a small number
unless you are one of the 79
and had a premonition it would happen
and begged not to be inoculated.
some of us liberals need to learn what “human rights” means.
and that a doctorate in microbiology does not make an expert in decency
any more than a doctorate in theology made someone an expert in the terrible danger of allowing a witch to live
coberly:
More drama? Is this a road you wish to go down?
run
actually, no.
but when i see children playing on the tracks I can’t help yelling at them to get off.
wrong analogy . . .
UK health minister Javid tests positive for COVID-19 (Reuters) -British health minister Sajid Javid on Saturday said he had tested positive for COVID-19, but added that his symptoms were mild and he was thankful to have had had two doses of vaccine against the disease. Javid, who has been health secretary for three weeks, has backed Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to scrap all remaining legal coronavirus restrictions from Monday, despite a fresh surge of cases fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant.
in a related manner, i’ve been wondering why the UK has been showing Covid deaths at ~10% of the US rate, despite now having more new cases than India…based on news reports i’ve read, it appears they’re now only counting those who’ve had a positive Covid test within 4 weeks of their death…
oh, btw, Javid would not be counted as a new Covid case in the US, because The CDC stopped tracking most COVID-19 cases in vaccinated people. That makes it hard to know how dangerous Delta really is
US covid cases in vaccinated people only count when they’re serious enough to end up in the hospital…that doesn’t stop them from spreading the disease though, their ‘milder symptoms’ include a lot of infectious sneezing..
rjs@7:38 July17
it makes a fella wonder, doesn’t it.
i have more questions than i have answers, coberly..
this week, the UK passed India to record the third highest 7 day average of new cases on Thursday, and then passed Brazil to move into the 2nd spot globally sometime in the past 24 hours…how does the UK, reportedly 70% vaccinated, have more new cases than India, who has 20 times the population? does India have a magic shot that protects 2 dozen people for every jab…
meanwhile, this week’s new cases in the US were just 20% below those of India’s, and 21.5% lower than those of Brazil, and they’re rising at a 55% week over week clip…with India’s cases falling 8% week over week and Brazil’s falling 16%, it should just be a matter of days before the US is recording the 3rd most new cases worldwide…
so how could we end up worse off than Brazil and India, with all their issues?
well, having questions before answers is traditional
and having questions after answers is probably wise
but in these days it’s hard to find honest questions, much less honest answers
maybe the best answer is just to go to the beach
[see book/movie, late fifties: On The Beach]
I looked up the movie on google (wiki). found that the parts i did not remember were perhaps not worth remembering: the hollywood parts. but then i thought that maybe the hollywood parts were important. besides giving the people the chance to absorb the message by meditating on it for 90 minutes, it may be that the hollywood parts ARE the message, though us sophisticates have lost it, or don’t remember that we have it. the end of the world…the end of life on the world… as an abstract proposition would probably not hold our attention nearly so well as the loss of everything we love…even as presented in the hollywood version.
oh, perhaps the best part of the wiki review was at the end: the reaction of the U.S. government: they didn’t like the movie because (at the time) there were “not enough atomic weapons to cause extinction.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/18/nation/with-pandemic-worsening-us-surgeon-general-worried/?event=event25
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/18/world/covid-variant-vaccine-updates/the-us-pandemic-safety-net-is-coming-apart-now-what