Last week, I shared an update of COVID trends where there was an alarming spike in COVID cases in several countries and states. Here's an update after a week:
Looking at the country case growth, France and Italy have shown an alarming spike up. The US, Germany, and Sweden continue to rise as well. Spain's track is misleading because they can go days between reporting case counts so an average would show a steep drop off that will likely resume an upward climb when they report numbers again this week.
To get a better view of recent trends, I've created a graph just for Q4 from this data.
Of the US/European countries, the UK is the only one that has leveled off from the October spike. The other curious exception is Canada, which continues to show relatively little COVID growth.
Looking at our trends of tests and cases, the number of tests dropped off dramatically from over 2 million a day over Halloween weekend back down to around 1.3 million a day after the election. The percent positive testing went up in the same time which would suggest most of the extra testing we were doing weren't finding many more cases (if you use few tests to find the same number of cases, the rate of positives per tests goes up).
Looking at the change in positive test rates, we still aren't showing the kind of steep rise seen in the European countries.
When we looked last week, I noted that the cases per day had risen while the deaths per day had not. Another week in, we're seeing the death rate start to rise. Let's hope it doesn't completely follow our case trend.
Switching our focus to the states, here is the latest on case growth in NC and comparable states:
In the last week, NC and Georgia seem to have levelled out while Michigan and Florida are following the national trajectory.
A look at the NC tests per day and positive test rate show improvement from last week. While the tests per day continue to trend up, the positive test rate is now trending down again:
Finally, the hospitalizations in NC are still higher than ideal, but remain pretty steady -- but watch the climb for Michigan. This state, which started with one of the worst hospitalization rates in the country, saw a relatively mild summer but is now seeing a concerning spike.
That wraps up the report for this week. Thanks for your kind comments and re-posts.
