Covid-19 Summer
Checking in on the metrics, trends & Delta
We’re now squarely in the dog days of summer, and the heat has arrived—so too has our latest rise in Covid-19 metrics. As many of you reading this know, I’ve followed Covid data more closely than most. For well over a year, along with my Twitter data updates, I’ve tried to provide context on the trends—both good and bad (with an admitted slight bias toward optimism). Scroll through Twitter or read a few news stories right now and you may come away misinformed. Read only the headlines and you’ll certainly be misinformed. Even for those who generally report Covid straight, the prevailing wisdom is almost always trailing wisdom in terms of the general media consensus. Our leaders no doubt ponder what to do next, and many continue to discuss implementing or recommending the return of certain restrictions:
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, describing himself as “very frustrated.”
He said recommending that the vaccinated wear masks is “under active consideration” by the government’s leading public health officials.
So, with school and the fall on the near horizon, I figured now might be a good time for a gut check on the latest in what the metrics show.
The UK’s Falling Cases
After a couple head fakes downward in mid-June and early-to-mid July, the UK’s reported Covid cases have finally begun to drop. The UK has reported 162,213 cases in the 5 days since Thursday of last week. The same 5 days the week before? 243,208.1 That’s a 33% drop in reported cases over that span—a monster drop when you consider the UK is only a week removed from 40%+ week-over-week rises in reported cases.
Unless something drastic happens, the UK’s 7-day-averaged reported cases for this wave (the summer Delta wave) peaked at 47,696 on July 21, 2021. I was a day off:
The UK pandemic-wide peak was on January 6 at 59,660 average daily cases, so the recent peak is roughly ~80% of the UK’s pandemic peak. Of course, deaths are the more important metric, and they lag cases. The UK as of today is averaging 63.6 reported deaths per day as a 7-day average (down a bit from yesterday’s 64.3). At its peak on January 19, the UK was at 1285.4. While we likely have not have seen UK’s peak in deaths associated with this wave, there is no question that deaths have massively decoupled from cases compared to six months ago.
US Still Climbing
The UK had a 4-5 week head start on Delta saturation on the US as a whole, so we are right in the midst of our summer wave. Some areas started climbing much closer on the UK’s heels, however, and could show declines as early as this week.
The CDC’s data is solid now, and I’ve been using it for US-level data since our team stopped gathering straight from the state data dashboards a few weeks back. The data is revised consistently though, and more recent data is not as reliable (and would skew the numbers lower during a rise like this). Let’s take a look at our current metrics as of this past Friday (Thursday for hospitalizations based on the CDC’s lag) compared to the US case numbers as of the same Friday in 2020 (data from the CDC):
2021
47,684 cases (7DA), up 54.8% (week-over-week)
7.22% of tests positive, up 35.5%
23,654 hospitalizations, up 39.5%
252 deaths, up 16.7%
2020
67,276 cases, down 1.3%
9.34% of tests positive, down 7.2%
38,000 hospitalizations, up 7.9%2
1,045 deaths, up 15.6%
Our rise in 2021 began a little later than it did last year, and so most of us who follow the data predicted to peak date to also shift to the right. That appears to be happening, though based on my tweet above, you can see that I think (and hope) we’ll still see a downturn in early August nationally.
An Early August Peak?
Part of the reason I think we’ll see an early August peak is because Florida and Texas combined make up 34% of the case rise and 42% of the rise in hospitalizations over the past week. Florida especially has been on a rocket ship in terms of its recent rise in Covid metrics. But like many Delta-induced rocket ships across the pond that we’ve seen come back to Earth, I’m hoping to see Florida (and others) do the same. Florida puts out its state update weekly on Fridays, and as of last Friday these were the week-over-week rises we saw:
The rate of increase, while still extremely high, slowed over the last week. But that doesn’t tell the entire story. The next tweet in that thread shows the positive testing percentage at huge levels, and on a steady increase:
So it’s likely the underlying cases over the past several weeks have increased at a much higher clip than the 90+% peak shown above. These types of numbers harken back more to the “cases are 10x” multiplier from early in the pandemic than the “cases are 2.5-5x” at other times (depending on the spread and positive testing percentage). When Florida and Texas crest the hill, it’ll provide a hell of a lot of downward pressure on the metrics (along with several of the other “early mover” states that should start downward soon).
Here’s another factor: we have been wide open as an economy for months damn near everywhere. Gatherings, clubs, sporting events, bars, restaurants, travel…almost everything looks more like summer 2019 than summer 2020. So when an apparent fast-mover like Delta enters the picture and (a) we become fully saturated and (b) continue to live life normally, it gets around about as fast as it possibly can at our given level of protection via vaccination and prior infection. There is no question we’re fully saturated: 1113 of 1216 sequences (91.5%) conducted in the two-week period ending today have been Delta. In other words, we are taking Delta’s biggest punches right now.
Based on the above and how quickly other countries have come down after experiencing quick increases, I suspect the southern states will find their peaks in early August. I also suspect we will start seeing some peaks even sooner in places like Missouri, Nevada, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Utah—early Delta states. Springfield, Missouri was one of the very early movers in terms of Delta saturation, and is about a week post-peak in terms of cases (and appears to be post-peak in hospitalizations also). Delta has reached out and touched more folks than we realize, and if we were testing like the UK, we would have already seen national Covid cases rise to much higher numbers (which would also have shown an even larger decoupling deaths).
I know that the prevailing wisdom is to look at an epidemic curve on the way up, take out a sharpie, and draw a dotted line extended to the moon. Then, of course, we retweet the shit out of it. I don’t want to run down every article or verified tweet that either predicted or amplified a prediction that the UK would crest 100K cases as a daily average, but I’m sure they were legion. No doubt many of the same sharpie-wielders are currently thinking 250K for the US. I’ll take the (way) under.
Covid-19 is ugly enough on its own; we don’t need to dress it up in a vampire costume. That only serves to reduce trust in our leaders, media, institutions, and each other. And while I know trust hasn’t exactly been at an all-time high for a long time now, I see no benefit in ensuring its continued demise. I’ve given you the numbers—straight from official sources—along with some thoughts that might provide a little insight. So before you auto-retweet something that sounds sensational or thinly sourced (including this post), take a minute to check the data for yourself.
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The UK government website gets revised from time to time. These numbers are current as of the website’s reporting on July 26, 2021.
The CDC hospitalization data doesn’t begin until August 1, 2020. I’m approximating based on equating to the dashboard data, and I’m using the % increase shown in the dashboard data as well.
A few confounding factors for the UK: firstly, the rise coincided with the European soccer championship, held largely in England, and with England getting to the final. The biggest growth in cases was in men aged 18 to 44, which I think is non coincidental. Now that's over, cases have come down. Secondly, we have just opened up nightclubs and removed limits to indoor gatherings. The impacts of that will start to be felt this week. Finally, schools have finished for the summer. That takes away both a whole lot of mixing, and a whole lot of testing. So this week might be different, and a lot of the experts are a bit confused (but grateful). Let's hope the steep downwards trend continues. That 100k a day figure comes from Boris Johnson by the way, and he is not known for his pessimism.
But it also makes it harder to apply what happens in the UK directly to the US.
Two things I would note:
One is that delta mainly impacts the unvaccinated here, and whilst we are only circa 9% more vaccinated than the us as a whole, our strict vaccination by age regime means that significantly more older (and therefore more vulnerable) people are vaccinated in the UK. 93.9% of over 50s in England have had both doses, for example. That's really helped keep death rates low here, but I fear it won't apply in the US, at least in the less vaccinated states.
The second is that the UK's map of active cases started a bit like the US's, with distinct hotspots (Blackburn and Glasgow) which then spread to the north west and most of Scotland. As these subsided, the whole of the rest of the country took off. If you are following our pattern, then I think cases have a long way to go. I don't know about 250k, but I'd take the over on 150k.
the virus' political task remains...... likely the panic ball will be in the air until nov 2022