Saturday, April 24, 2021

There's an Uptick in Community Spread as U.S. Surpasses 32 Million COVID-19 Cases

The United States now passed 32 million COVID-19 cases. According to John Hopkins University, there are 32,038,232 cases of COVID-19 resulting in 571,883 deaths representing a mortality rate of 1.8%. 

When the U.S. reached 31 million cases on April 9th, I made this observation:

Over the past month or so there has been some degree of stabilization in new COVID cases. This country has been adding 1 million new cases every 16 days. It took 16 days to get from 30 million to 31 million new cases. It took 16 days to get from 29 million to 30 million new cases. It took 16 days to get from 28 million to 29 million cases after taking 13 days to get from 27 million to 28 million cases. 

I have a bad feeling it will take less than 16 days to get to 32 million cases. This bad feeling is based on superspreader events like the Texas Rangers home opener earlier this week which had a capacity crowd. Despite mask requirements, this was observed in the breach

Well, it took 15 days to get from 31 million to 32 million cases. Now some might ask what difference a day makes. It means we're heading in the wrong direction. Dr. Fauci has long said we need to get to a place where there are 10,000 or fewer new cases a day before lifting restrictions in a meaningful way. We're at 66,000. While that's certainly better than 100,000 or 200,000 new cases a day (much less the 350,000 cases a day that have been reported in India over the past several days) it demonstrates the spread of COVID-19 is far from over. 

It's entirely that this is an aberration and that it could take 16 days or longer to get to 33 million cases. But with all the re-openings which have taken place in conjunction with increased vaccinations I think the case numbers will soon accelerate again thus resulting in more hospitalizations and deaths. In other words, I think 33 million cases will be here in less than a fortnight.

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