Your national (U.S.) report: March 21, 2021
Cases are increasing, but this doesn't mean hospitalizations/deaths will too...
Cases continue to increase across the pond, including Italy, Sweden, France, Germany, and Denmark. This is a bit worrying because an increase in European cases has consistently acted as an early warning signal to the U.S.
Right now, as a whole, the U.S. is holding down the fort. COVID-19 cases have decreased for the past 9 weeks. The current 7-day moving average of new cases (53,200) decreased 78.7% compared with the highest peak on January 11, 2021, (249,389). Unfortunately, though, we have yet to fully recover from wave 3.
But, when we look at individual areas, there are some concerns. In MI, NJ, DC, ID, and NH cases continue to increase. (Ignore the plummet at the end of the line graphs, this is an unfortunate feature of the CDC website).
With the increase in cases, we need to start watching hospitalization and death trends. Until now, we’ve seen a consistent pattern: increase in cases, followed by an increase in hospitalizations (3ish week lag), followed by an increase in deaths (4ish week lag).
Vaccinations, though, should start interrupting this painfully predictable trend. In the United States, 13% of our population is fully vaccinated (40.8% of 65+ are fully vaccinated). Because of this, I’ve already started seeing a change in hospitalization patterns.
I’ll give an example with some of the data I work with. In “County X”, we are seeing two things:
Once a subgroup hits a 30% threshold (e.g. at least 30% of the subpopulation is vaccinated), COVID19 hospitalizations start to wane. In County X, once 30% of the 70+ population was vaccinated, we saw COVID19 hospitalizations for 70+ begin to decrease.
However, we also start to see hospitalizations increase among younger subgroups. One reason is obvious…Because this graph adds up to 100%, subgroups will naturally increase if another decreases. However, we need to be sure this is NOT due to the more transmissible (and deadly) variants circling in County X, which could land younger populations in the hospital that wouldn’t have before.
A decrease in hospitalizations is, obviously, fantastic. However, this doesn’t give carte blanche to go wild. 13% of people infected get long COVID19. Also, the variants first detected in Brazil and S Africa are looking worse and worse (I can post about the latest science tomorrow).
Bottom line: Trends will be interesting to follow in the upcoming weeks, and may not be as straightforward as we’ve seen in the past.
Love, YLE
Thank you for seeing out your information, watching the increases in my state of Michigan at least the weather will be better, but we need to keep the restrictions.
Katelyn, I saw media reports from this weekend from CNBC that cases are actually increasing now in 21 states? But they didn't link to their source. Thoughts?