Covid-19 Update: 13 December

So as begin to head into winter, where are we at with the spread of Covid-19 in the five states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois?

Nowhere good. Let’s take a look.

If you recall where we were at last week, also not great but better, cases had resumed rising post-Thanksgiving across the board. The data from yesterday indicates that cases have continued to rise everywhere but Illinois, which initiated a lockdown earlier than the other states we cover.

But Philadelphia did eventually institute a lockdown and eventually the rest of the Commonwealth followed, and similar measures—none of course as significant as those from the spring—were enacted in other states.

If you look at the very tippy tip top of the curves in the other four states, we might just be seeing an inflection point. That is, the curve of new cases could be slowing from their near exponential rates of increase. The numbers released today we should expect to be lower than average. Consequently we will want to see the numbers beginning Tuesday through the end of the week to see whether this slowdown is real or a blip.

Regardless of whether or not new cases numbers are slowing down, we have to contend with rising numbers of deaths. Deaths of course lag new cases by weeks, sometimes as many as 4–8. So if we hypothetically hit peak new cases today, we would expect the number of deaths to continue rising and then peak perhaps sometime in mid- to late-January.

So where are we with deaths today? Also nowhere good. Let’s take a look.

In all five states with the potential exception of Illinois, new deaths continue to rise. Pennsylvania, worryingly, will likely surpass the peak death rate it saw in the spring if current trends continue. I would expect that sometime likely this week.

Illinois remains the one state where we might be seeing some good news. As I just mentioned above, deaths lag new cases by several weeks. And several weeks ago we appear to have peaked there in terms of new cases. It’s possible that we are beginning to or have already seen peak deaths in Illinois and that the next several weeks could be a gradual decline as the state gets its outbreak under control.

In the other four states, if we were to hypothetically peak with new cases this week, again, we would likely see these orange lines continue heading upwards for several weeks to come. And in that case, we’d almost certainly pass the peak death rates of the spring in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia. New Jersey might be the exception to that, however. And that would be largely due to the fact that so many deaths there happened so early in the pandemic before we had identified the best ways to save lives.

I suspect that the data coming out this week will be important to inform us whether or not we have crested or begun to crest this latest wave of infections.

Credit for the piece is mine.