10-20-2020, 12:54 PM
[tweet]https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/1318322241520594944?s=20[/tweet]
The COVID tracking project provides much the same data. You can see that daily testing continues to increase (good news). The number of daily cases are going up, but are not yet up to the level of the summer wave. It remains to be seen how close we are to the maximum; if you squint, you might be able to convince yourself that things are starting to level off (yesterday's number of daily cases are lower than the seven-day average, despite being a weekday), though that may be wishful thinking on my part. Hospitalizations are also rising, though the increase in hospitalizations is not as pronounced as the number of new cases (there is a short delay). There is no evidence that the number of deaths are going up, but deaths are more delayed. Still, the ratio of death to hospitalization went down from the first to the second peak, and would be expected to go down further as we get better at treating COVID-19. At the peak of the first wave there was one death for every 30 hospitalizations; that went down to one death per sixty hospitalizations in the summer.
If we really are leveling off, then I think we may be ok. On the other hand, if the number of cases continues to climb, then it may only be a matter of time before hospitalizations and deaths start climbing as well.
BC
The COVID tracking project provides much the same data. You can see that daily testing continues to increase (good news). The number of daily cases are going up, but are not yet up to the level of the summer wave. It remains to be seen how close we are to the maximum; if you squint, you might be able to convince yourself that things are starting to level off (yesterday's number of daily cases are lower than the seven-day average, despite being a weekday), though that may be wishful thinking on my part. Hospitalizations are also rising, though the increase in hospitalizations is not as pronounced as the number of new cases (there is a short delay). There is no evidence that the number of deaths are going up, but deaths are more delayed. Still, the ratio of death to hospitalization went down from the first to the second peak, and would be expected to go down further as we get better at treating COVID-19. At the peak of the first wave there was one death for every 30 hospitalizations; that went down to one death per sixty hospitalizations in the summer.
If we really are leveling off, then I think we may be ok. On the other hand, if the number of cases continues to climb, then it may only be a matter of time before hospitalizations and deaths start climbing as well.
BC