r.j. sigmund‘s notes on Covid Metrics

It appears all US Covid metrics are now heading down except for deaths, but we can expect deaths to head lower in a week or two as well, as the reduced numbers of those who are newly infected work through the health care system…among the CDC’s “early indicators” “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, fell to 16.3% during the week ending August 31st, after test positivity  for the week ending August 24th was revised down to 16.7% from the 17.0% reported a week ago . . . at the same time, Covid cases accounted for 2.3% of hospital emergency room patients during the week ending August 31st, down from a unrevised 2.5% of emergency patients during the week ending August 24th; that’s still quite elevated, though, since Covid cases had been accounting for just 0.4% of hospital emergency room patients during the disease lull this spring . . . meanwhile, in data that is two weeks older, the CDC reports that the Covid hospitalization rate fell to 4.6 per 100,000 population during the week ending August 17th, down from a revised 4.8 per 100,000 during the week ending August 10th,  after the Covid hospitalization rate for the week ending August 10th was revised up from the 4.6  per 100,000 that was reported a week ago…

The CDC reported that Covid accounted for 2.6% of all US deaths during the week ending August 31st, up from 2.2% of US deaths during the week ending August 24th….eight weeks earlier, Covid deaths were accounting for 0.8% of all US deaths, so the proportion of Covid deaths has more than tripled since then . . . meanwhile, the CDC’s provisional Covid deaths graph, which lags current data by 3 weeks, shows there were 971 US deaths from Covid during the week ending August 10th, up from an upwardly revised 891 deaths during the week ending August 3rd, and up from an upwardly revised 741 US Covid deaths during the week ending July 27th, . . . that lagging weekly deaths count is the highest it’s been since March 16th, but it’s still quite low by historical standards; since early 2020, we’ve had nine Covid waves where the Covid death toll surpassed 1,000 per week…

The CDC’s national reading for viral activity in wastewater remains VERY HIGH, but the numerical metric they generate to indicate the viral activity level fell this week to a figure that is now the lowest in four weeks . . . their national wastewater viral activity graph still shows 16 increases in the past 18 weeks, but the national viral activity level. For the week ending August 31st fell to 7.78, down from a downwardly revised 8.33 during the week  ending August 24th, and also below the downwardly revised 8.12 level during the week ending August 17th, which is now shown as down from a downwardly revised 8.37 for  the week ending August 10th . . . for perspective, that national viral activity level metric had bottomed out at 1.34 on May 5th, after climbing to as high as 13.60 on December 30th, even as i would caution against trying to compare those numbers numerically, since they’re generated by an algorithm..

Regionally, the wastewater viral activity level is now heading lower everywhere except the Midwest, where it rose from an upwardly revised 8.29 for the week ending August 24th to 8.55 for the week ending August 31st . . . the viral activity level in the West, which had been running much higher than the other regions throughout this summer’s surge, fell from 9.71 for the week ending August 24th to 9.17 for the week ending August 31st; it had been as high as 12.62 as recently August 3rd….in the South, the viral activity level metric fell from fell from 10.04 for the week ending August 24th to 8.51 for the week ending August 31st, while their wastewater metric for the Northeast fell from 6.07 for the week ending August 24th to 5.61 for the week ending August 31st…for a breakdown of their viral activity level by state, the CDC has a separate page with Covid State and Territory trends, and also a color coded national map with 6 different levels of severity….Ohio is among the worst, with a viral activity level of 10, which corresponds to “very high” . . .