The Return of COVID REPORTS - 11/1 Update

It's been quite some time since I've released a COVID report, but I have continued to keep the data in my spreadsheet up to date in the meantime.  

There's a lot of news about new rises in COVID in October.  Here's a graph of selected countries showing the change in their daily new case rates:

From this graph, you can see that many countries, including the USA are trending up, but besides the US, they all seem to be in Europe.  India, Argentina, Chile, and South Africa are flat or trending downwards.  The US isn't curving up as much as the European countries, but it's possible we are just lagging Europe and will turn up faster in the coming weeks.  Looking at the trend above, it's possible that climate is again a factor.  As the weather cools in Europe people could be moving indoors more while in the southern hemisphere things warm up.  However,  the temperature in France, where the outbreak is most severe, is not much different at the end of October than it was at the beginning so it may have nothing to do with weather. 

Looking at the US, out test rate has ramped up significantly this fall -- much of this could have to do with the greater availability of the rapid COVID testing that has become broadly available.  This graph shows the rate of testing in blue and the positive test rate in red (the test rate scale is to the right of the graph). 

The encouraging thing is that the positive test rate has remained flat while the number of tests has climbed.   This could mean that the rise in US cases could primarily be from increased testing instead of a rise in the infection rate.  It's widely believed that many more people have been infected with COVID than have been received a positive test.  If the positive test rate stays flat while the test rate goes up, it could mean we are just finding more of those hidden cases. 

To see if we're on track with Europe,  let's see how their testing rate per population has changed:

Different countries don't report their testing every day so the lines are a little ragged, but you can see they are trending up similarly to ours.  Now let's compare the test positive rates:

You can see that while the US positive test rate has been fairly flat since September, the positive test rate of the other countries have gotten sharply higher.   This suggests that whatever Europe is experiencing, it is a different and more alarming growth than the US because the actual infection rates seem to be rising rapidly. 

While the US case rate is going up, the mortality rate has remained fairly flat in the us during the case rate rise.  

It's a little too soon to tell if this trend will continue, though.  You can see how in the summer the death curve rose a couple weeks after the case curve did.  The major spike in our October curve occurred mid-month so we could still see a sharp climb in the death rate in the next week or so. Let's hope this doesn't happen. 

For all the overwhelming numbers, though, its important to consider our COVID cases in light of the recoveries:

If you allow a conservative 21 days on average for someone who has tested positive with COVID to recover (some take much longer but many take less time).  You can see that the vast majority of the COVID cases in the US (almost 85%) have already recovered and the active number of cases is relatively low.

For the rest of this report, we'll look at North Carolina. Since March, I have been tracking the daily stats from Georgia and Michigan (who are closest to our state in population) as well as Florida, who has roughly twice our population.  When we compare the daily cases per 1M population, you can see some interesting trends:

 For most of the Pandemic,  NC has had a relatively mild experience compared to Michigan, who saw a huge spike early in the pandemic, and Florida and Georgia, who up until recently always had larger case growth than NC.  Around the end of September, NC saw a sharp rise while Ga and Fl dropped down and have stayed fairly level.  A couple weeks later, Michigan saw a very sharp spike upwards.  The black line represents the national trend here.  NC is not turning up as sharply as the national average while Michigan is on a very similar trajectory at this point. 

The daily death rates tell a similar story:

Florida and Georgia saw much higher death rates and Michigan had a horrific start to the pandemic. At this point all the numbers seem to be converging on the same rate of about 2.5 deaths per 1 million people -- that's 25 in NC.  If you compare these last two graphs, you'll see that the summer death curve comes about 2 weeks after the case growth curve for Florida and Georgia, so its possible the death rate will rise in the next week or so Michigan and NC.   

If we look at the number of tests per day and positive testing over time in NC, you can see that the tests per day and positive test rates are both slightly increasing, but this incline is not as steep as we saw in Europe:

Finally, here is a graph of Hospitalizations across the four states:

This is a graph of the number of people currently hospitalized in each state.  It's not adjusted for population so it would be normal for Florida to have twice the hospitalizations as the other states. While recent news reports that we've hit a new high in hospitalizations is technically correct, you can see that NC has always had a relatively low and stable hospitalization level of COVID patients.  Note that Michigan's hospitalizations have recently increased on the same pattern as their new cases while the other states so far have not.  

In the coming weeks we should see what shape this new growth trend will take and how it will be reflected in hospitalizations and fatalities.  I will try to post another update in a couple weeks.