This time last week I wrote about how we should not be surprised at rising levels of coronavirus in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. After all, our elected officials reopened economies despite data saying they should do otherwise. On top of that, people have been engaging in reckless behaviour and seemingly abandoning the very behaviours that had been leading to declining rates. With those two failures, our last hope is that vaccines will come quickly and be widely taken by the public.
A week hence.
Well, we are beginning to see some divergent patterns, especially with new cases.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Last week there was some evidence that New Jersey might be bucking the trend and headed downwards after weeks of rising new cases. And now that appears to be a more sustained trend as the line for the Garden State’s seven-day average clearly began headed the right direction this past week.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that we continue to see rising numbers of new cases in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Illinois. Although if we want to try and find the positives in the bad, we can see that Delaware’s upward trend remains fairly shallow. Illinois, while steeper, is rising from a lower base as the Land of Lincoln managed to reach low, summer levels of new case spread earlier this year. And in Pennsylvania, there is a bend in the curve, an inflection point, that could indicate growth in the number of new cases is slowing. We still need to see it turn negative, but slowing growth is better than increasing growth.
Virginia splits the difference between those sets. It remains at an elevated level of new case transmission, but the upward tick we saw—unlike the other states—was not followed by a general surge in new cases. The little rise we did see, in fact seems to have perhaps shifted back downward.
One of the big questions in this current wave of new cases is will deaths rise? We are seeing increasing numbers of new cases and hospitalisations, but will deaths follow? The hope is that we have vaccinated enough of the most vulnerable populations to prevent them from suffering the most serious of results.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
So far so good. While death rates remain slightly elevated over summer levels, we do not yet see any signs of rising numbers of deaths. The only possible exception is Virginia, where cases bottomed out after the state added delayed death certificates from the holidays, but have risen in recent days.
Finally we have vaccinations. Here is the best news at which we can look. We can now say that at least 20% of the populations of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois are fully vaccinated. To be clear, that is still a long way from herd immunity levels, but that’s 20 percentage points more than we had four months ago.
Total full vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
One big outstanding question is how much, if at all, can vaccinated people spread coronavirus? This is why we need to continue to wear masks and socially distance even those who have been vaccinated. But at some point—I don’t know when—these increasing levels of full vaccination should begin to flatten the new case curves. Could that be what’s flattening the curves in New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania? It’s too early to say, but one can hope.
This morning I read a piece in Politico Playbook that broke down President Biden’s $2.25 trillion proposal for infrastructure spending. A thing generally regarded as the United States sorely needs. $2.25 trillion is a lot of money and it’s a fair question to ask whether all that money is really money for infrastructure.
Because, it turns out, it’s not.
Please, sir, may I have more train money?
That isn’t to say money spent on job retraining or home care services wouldn’t be money well spent. Rather, it’s just not infrastructure.
But politics and the English language is a topic for another day. Oh wait, somebody already did write about that.
Last week I wrote about how the inevitable rise in new Covid-19 cases was occurring in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. Now, one, in the last week, we saw no evidence of states preparing to reinforce their public health and safety restrictions. And two, whilst we have no data on people not following guidelines, anecdotally a large group of people threw a party in my building’s common amenities space so it does seem like people are feeling less inclined to wear masks, socially distance, and isolate to their own households.
Those two conditions, of course, do not help reduce the case count. Instead they add to it. So it should come as no surprise that Covid-19 continues to rapidly spread in our five states, though some are doing worse than others.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania arguably performed the worst. If we look at the peak to trough decline from early winter’s surge to late winter’s nadir, we can see that New Jersey has reached 40% of that peak. Pennsylvania enjoyed a better decline and so has a large gap, but is still nearing 20% its previous peak.
Illinois is also remarkable—again not in a good way—as its peak to trough fall was even greater than Pennsylvania’s, however it’s also now clearly rising. The Land of Lincoln, however, did manager to reach late summer levels of new cases—good. But those are now rising—bad. Delaware too is seeing a rise, albeit at a slower rate than its two tristate neighbours.
Only Virginia’s rise remains slight, barely discernible in the chart.
Deaths, while not exactly good news, aren’t exactly good news either. Last week I mentioned how they had stalled out and stopped declining. That is better than rising death rates, but the levels of deaths per day is still higher than we saw last summer. In other words, things could be significantly better even in pandemic terms.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Last week? Deaths continued to stubbornly persist at those elevated levels. We remain vigilant, looking for any indication that deaths will follow the rates of new cases and hospitalisations and begin to climb.
The hope, of course, is that we have vaccinated enough of the most at risk populations to prevent a surge in deaths. But, we just don’t know yet. The only good news is that vaccinations continue to progress.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
Illinois has surpassed 18% of its population being fully vaccinated. Virginia is not far behind at 17.75%. Pennsylvania, because of the bifurcated nature of its data reporting, remains unclear. It sits at 17.8% fully vaccinated, but Philadelphia has not posted updated data since late Thursday. It’s likely that the Commonwealth has joined Illinois in surpassing 18%, but it’s not fully certain.
Also this past week, the CDC updated its guidance for the fully vaccinated, saying that it was safe for them to travel. I take some issue with this, primarily on the messaging front.
First, we need to be clear about what fully vaccinated means. It means two weeks after your final dose. For Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, that means two weeks after your shot as you only receive one. For both Pfizer and Moderna, you are only fully vaccinated two weeks after your second shot—not before. And keep in mind with Pfizer you need to wait three weeks between first and second dose. With Moderna it’s four weeks. In other words, with J&J you need to wait two weeks after your first (and only) shot before you can begin to follow the loosened guidelines. If you receive Pfizer’s, you need to wait five weeks from your first shot, assuming you do receive your second three weeks later, and with Moderna it’s six weeks, again assuming the recommended four week gap.
The problem is that only about 20% of the US population is fully vaccinated. And with the virus spreading at high rates and at high levels, it poses a significant risk as the newer, more lethal, and more infectious variants could take root in the United States and overwhelm the healthcare systems of the 50 states. We do not yet know if fully vaccinated people can spread the virus if they do become infected.
I think the advice should have remained to refrain from all but essential travel until we reached a high percentage of fully vaccinated folks. I ballparked earlier this week something like 2/3 the estimated amount of full vaccinations required for herd immunity (est. at 75%). In other words, keeping restrictions on travel until at least 50% of the US becomes fully vaccinated.
We remain several weeks away from that milestone, unfortunately. I understand the desire/urge people have to get out and do things and enjoy spring after a year of isolation. Sadly, if winter was the darkest/hardest part of the pandemic, I think that makes spring and early summer the most challenging. Because we see progress, we see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it coincides with warmer weather and we want nothing more to get out and do things and see people. But that is the last thing we need to be doing at this point.
I’ve often described the vaccination as the marshmallow test. In a study, scientists presented kids with a marshmallow. They could eat the marshmallow immediately, but if they waited 15 minutes, unsupervised, they could then have an additional marshmallow. We are all just grabbing that first marshmallow whilst the promise of a more normal summer is ours if we can wait just 15 minutes.
Two weeks ago I wrote about how new cases in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois were stalling out, i.e. no longer declining. Additionally, with the exception of Illinois, they were stalling at rates far higher than what we saw last summer. I wrote
This means that the environment is ripe for a new surge of cases if people stop following social distancing and begin resuming indoor activities with other people. Sadly, both those things appear to be occurring throughout the US.
Two weeks hence, one of one thing inevitably occurred.
New cases are now rising in all five states. I wrote about the flat tails of the curves for the seven-day averages. A quick look at the chart shows those have swung upwards, in some cases sharply.
New case curves in PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Two weeks ago I referenced Europe as a cautionary tale. Governments there eased up on their restrictions, cases surged, and then as hospitalisations rose, governments had to reimpose restrictions and effect new lockdowns. Europe has typically been 3–4 weeks ahead of us throughout the pandemic. So that we are now at a point where we are seeing rising cases, absolutely none of this should be surprising.
The evidence has been in our faces for weeks, plus we have the European example to look at. Reopening makes no sense until we can get case numbers lower, especially with new more virulent and lethal strains of coronavirus now circulating.
Deaths too have been trending the wrong way over the last few weeks.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
We have seen the curves largely bottom out. And if you look closely, these bottoms are higher than the rates we saw last summer, in some cases more than 3× as much. This flattening occurred just a few weeks after cases began to flatten. The question becomes, will they rise in a few weeks time? Or have we vaccinated enough of our most vulnerable populations?
That’s the real wildcard.
Right now, we have only fully vaccinated about 15% of the populations of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
Is that enough to prevent hospitalisations and deaths in what looks like will be a fourth wave?
Or just shake my hand, because today marks the second St. Patrick’s Day spent in isolation. I am lucky, of course, because two years ago I spent the holiday in Dublin. One of those bucket list kind of things. There I ran into a(n American) friend who was coincidentally in town. Then the next day I took the train to Cork to visit another friend. If you don’t count weddings, I think that was the last big trip I took.
Two years hence, I am here in my flat alone on a holiday meant to be spent with family and friends. But in the last year, I made significant progress on my Irish genealogy. For part of that progress I took two additional DNA tests. So this St. Patrick’s Day seems like a good time to reflect on those tests.
For those that don’t know, I do a lot of genealogy work as a hobby. Primarily I focus on paper records, but DNA is an important piece of the puzzle. In a sense, it is the only record that cannot lie. It will reveal your biological connections to family that may have been otherwise lost. And it cannot be faked.
But that’s only true for your genetic matches. Those are the real power of taking a DNA test. I would bet, however, that most people initially take the tests for the ethnicity estimates. On a day like today, how Irish are you? How Irish am I?
That’s a lot of green.
Not surprisingly, I’m pretty Irish.
Of course, if you look at me, those Irish values do not quite equal each other. So what’s the deal? After all, the underlying DNA does not change from spit tube to cheek swab.
The first thing to know is that in one sense, ethnicity is, like so many things, a social construct. Super broadly, every individual is unique—except twins. Of course humans have spread across the globe and in that spread, certain regions have evolved incredibly slight differences between the populations. In addition to those genetic differences, the populations created civilisations and cultures. An ethnicity, in a sense, is a group of people who share that culture, civilisation, and genetic similarities vis-a-vis genetic differences across the world.
Importantly, within those groups, we still have differences. The Irish, for example, are known for freckles and red hair. But not all Irish have those traits. Instead, again super broadly, we say that for a group of people, a certain percentage will share a certain set of features. Consequently, within an ethnic group, you will still have variations and outliers. In some cases because generations ago a traveller from a different group entered the gene pool for some reason or another. And while the offspring might identify entirely with their new civilisation and culture, their genes don’t lie and a DNA test would reveal their traits from their ancestor’s foreign gene pool.
The second point to make is that Ireland is a fairly modern creation. Ireland did not exist as a sovereign state until 1922. Before then, the idea of Ireland existed. The country, however, did not. A better example would be German or Italian. Neither Germany nor Italy existed until the 1870s and 1860s, respectively. If you have “German” ancestors who arrived in Philadelphia in 1848, you don’t have German ancestors. You have ancestors from one of the various principalities or bishoprics comprising the German Confederation. Italy had the Venetian Republic, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and many others. Being Irish, German, or Italian is thus a modern construct.
The third point is that identifying anyone as any of these ethnic groups requires a baseline for a comparison. To do that, you need a reference population in the area you are going to define as Ireland, Germany, or Italy. But humans have migrated throughout history. Ireland was conquered by the English. Germans…well, let’s just say Germans have a history with conquering parts of Europe. And so you can see exchanges of genetic information among populations pretty easily. And over time, those genetic populations evolve.
Take those three points and add them together in admixture test and your results are really only good back to about 500 years. And even then, you may find yourself belonging to something incredibly vague and all-encompassing because, especially as with France and Germany, there’s been too much mixture to get so granular as to fit ourselves within the borders of modern political states.
In the above results, you can see my “Irishness” varies from 63% to 75%. Though, as far as I know 21/32 (66%) of my 3xgreat-grandparents arrived from Ireland. That’s why I say I’m 2/3 Irish. But, genetically, I may be more or less because those 21 might have English or Scottish ancestors. Ancestry says I may be 18% Scottish, but whilst I have ancestors who lived in Scotland, I’m not aware of any ancestors born and raised for multiple generations in Scotland.
And then that’s just how Ancestry defines it. Compare that to my results from My Heritage. Because of the aforementioned difficulty in separating out certain population groups, they lump the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh together. Add my Ancestry Irish and Scottish together and I have 81%, not far from My Heritage’s 85% estimate. Then look at my results from Family Tree. They estimate me as 75% Irish, but add in the 10% Scandinavia and I’m up to 85%.
That brings me to my last point about DNA tests. It’s probably fair to say that I’m something like 80–85% genetically from the British Isles/North Sea region. What about the other 15–20%?
You will often hear you receive half your DNA from each of your parents. And they get half from each of theirs and so on and so forth. I’ve had conversations with folks who take that to mean they get 25% from each grandparent and 12.5% from each great-grandparent et cetera. But that’s not quite true.
You do receive 50% of your DNA from your father and the other 50% from your mother. But that 50%, well that’s a sort of random sample from the share your parents received from their parents.
My maternal grandfather was 100% Carpatho-Rusyn. For generations, his ancestors lived, reproduced, and died in the Carpathian Mountains. If we received exactly half from each previous generation, I should expect 25% of my DNA from my grandfather. But Ancestry, which has the best representation of this small ethnic group, says it’s 17% (though they give it as a range of being between 2 and 27%). In other words, I’m missing seven percentage points.
And so if you take a DNA test and you know you have a great-great grandparents of Irish descent, you may only see a small fraction in your results. If your connection to Ireland (or anywhere else) is even further back, the result becomes smaller still. In fact, beyond 5–7 generations back, you may not even inherit any genetic material from a specific ancestor in your family tree.
But ultimately, for today, as I wrote in one of my very first posts here on Coffeespoons, back in 2010, on St. Patrick’s Day, we’re all at least a little bit Irish.
Hopefully next year we’ll be able to celebrate in person.
Last week I wrote about how our progress in dealing with Covid-19 was stagnating. To put it simply, this past week did not get any better on that front.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
In Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Illinois we see that the flattened tail I described last week, well remained a flattened tail. In Delaware, we see more movement, but the average of the average, if you will, is flat over the last two weeks. And in New Jersey, where I mentioned some signs of rising numbers, we see a clearly rising number of new cases over the last week. Only in Virginia are numbers heading down, and those are shallowing out.
The problem here is that in Pennsylvania and Delaware, the new case rate, whilst flat, is well above the summer rate of low transmission. This means that the environment is ripe for a new surge of cases if people stop following social distancing and begin resuming indoor activities with other people. Sadly, both those things appear to be occurring throughout the US.
In Europe we see a cautionary tale. They too saw their holidays peaks decline and the national governments began easing restrictions on their populations. Within the last several days, however, new cases have begun to surge. Italy has gone so far as to announce a new lockdown. Other governments are considering the same.
If the United States cannot resume pushing its numbers of new cases down, it could well follow Europe into a new wave of outbreaks that would threaten lockdowns and push back our eventual return of normalcy.
None of this would be an issue if vaccinations were nearing herd immunity levels. However, in the states we cover, nowhere is above 12% fully vaccinated.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
Pennsylvania now lags behind the other two states. But at least the Commonwealth is over 10% fully vaccinated.
And of course, the problem under this dire scenario is that deaths could rise once again, though at this point the most vulnerable are in the middle of being vaccinated. Indeed, if we look at the last week, we see the good news for the week, that deaths are headed down in all five states.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Previously, Virginia had been working through a backlog of death records, but those appear now cleared. We are not quite back to summer-level lows, but we are steadily approaching them.
The big question this week will be what happens to those new cases numbers. Today’s data, Monday, will likely show lower numbers because of lower testing on the weekend. But starting Tuesday, what do we see over the course of the next five days?
Last week I wrote about some signals indicating a potential stagnation in terms of declining numbers of new cases. I also wrote about some potential signs of reversals, or increasing numbers of new cases.
This week, what we saw signs of came to pass.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
At the tail ends of each chart, you can see that the last week was broadly stagnant. In Pennsylvania and Illinois the seven-day average was itself remarkably flat. Delaware is now where it was this time last week; a slight rise in new cases was met with an equal magnitude decline.
In reversals, we have New Jersey. New case numbers there increased throughout the week. With lower weekend data, those numbers have fallen slightly.
Only in Virginia did we see good numbers in new cases. Numbers there fell over the last week, though notably at a slower pace than in previous weeks.
Deaths presented broadly good news. Last week we had mixed signals with increasing numbers in Delaware and Virginia. We knew the increase in Virginia was due to the state processing a backlog of death certificates with Covid.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
But in the last few days, those numbers have also fallen though the state reports it is still processing the backlog. And in Delaware, the daily number of deaths has also fallen again. I think it’s too early to say this peak has crested, but it could well be.
And in the other states, we continue to see slowly falling numbers of deaths. There are some potential signs of that bottoming or stalling out in Illinois, but we’ll have to see how this week pans out.
Finally, the best news we had over the course of last week was with vaccinations.
Vaccination curves for VA & IL.
Last week I mentioned that we can see the lines moving upwards as we approach 10% fully vaccinated in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois.
This week, well let’s start here: as I’ve pointed out in the past, Pennsylvania does not have a centralised reporting system. Most notably the state reports figures for all but Philadelphia county (coterminus with the city). The city reports its own figures. I aggregate the two. But for the last several days, the Philadelphia data site has been broken, so we don’t know the progress of vaccinations in the city. And as the largest city/county in the state, Philadelphia is an enormous part of figuring out the statewide numbers.
So looking only at Virginia and Illinois, the numbers look good. Virginia is at nearly 9.5%. Illinois is on 8.92%.
But we really need Philadelphia to get its act together.
This past weekend, I read an article in Politico discussing parents’ outrage over levels of lead and other toxic metals in baby food. The story focuses on a Congressional report into the matter, but that ties back into an EPA study from 2017 that investigated lead contamination. Specifically the article’s author notes “a chart that was buried in supplemental material”. Buried chart? Well I went off to investigate.
And I found all the charts. But I wanted to focus on one. I am not entirely clear what it means: Percent contribution by pathway adjusted for bioavailability of each media for NHEXAS Region 5 study. I get that it’s looking at channels of intake, but it’s unclear if this is lead or some other contaminant. Is this for all people? Or a sub-section of the population as other charts in that supplemental material pack are?
So I made a graphic where I compared the original to two alternate versions.
Now, the editorial focus of the article is on baby food, which is not the apparent focus of the study (unless it is couched in academic/technical terms). But what’s worth noting is that the pale yellow recedes into the background as the burgundy dominates the graphic.
If graphics are done well, they should show clear visual relationships, they do not need to label specific datapoints unless through a progressive disclosure of information. But if you are going to label everything, I would want to make certain that in the case of that same burgundy slice, we have sufficient contrast to read the 17% label.
Pie charts are not good at allowing people to compare slices. So the pie chart as the format here is not a great place to start, but as you can see in my Option 2, if you are going to choose a pie chart form, there are ways of making it more legible. Namely, do not make it three-dimensional.
Here the foreground receives prominence over the background, which may be receding and visually shrinking into the background. And as the point of a chart is to make visual comparisons, if we cannot compare like for like, it’s not ideal.
Also, we have the thickness of the pie chart. That vertical heights adds yellow to the slice of the pie we see in front. Casually, that makes the yellow slice appear even larger than it already is from the three-dimensional foreshortening.
Option 2 presents this as a stripped down pie chart. Make it flat. I used one colour with tints of one purple. I used the 100% to highlight the dietary intake channel, because of the Politico article’s focus.
But really, Option 1 is the improvement here. Comparing the smaller slices is easier here as the eye simply moves vertically down the graphic. We are also able to add axis lines that provide a context for where those values fall, between 0 and 10 for Water intake, and just over 10 for Air. Somewhere between 15 and 20 for Soil and dust ingestion.
Finally, that legend. We don’t want the reader to have to strain to identify what slice is what. Why is the legend in a box? Why is it so far away from the pie? In both my options I closely and visually link the labels to the slices/bars they represent. That makes it easier for the reader to know what they are looking at when they are looking at it.
The moral of the story, people, don’t use three-dimensional pie charts.
Credit for the original version goes to the EPA. Credit for the alternate versions is mine.
Last week we saw some positive trends with respect to new Covid-19 cases in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois area. What did we see this week? Curiously, we saw stagnating figures and, in some instances, slight reversals.
New case curves in PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
This stagnation can be seen by the small flattenings at the end of the lines for Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Virginia. And if you look at Delaware and New Jersey, you can see the reversals as little upward hooks.
I do not think this means we will be returning to the levels we saw earlier this winter. In fact, if you look a little ways back in Delaware and a bit further back in both Pennsylvania and Illinois you can see a similar pattern. Slight reversals appear as jagged little outcrops on the slope. New cases do indeed climb for a week or so—probably isolated to specific geographies within those states tied to outbreak clusters, but that’s pure speculation on my part.
These reversals, therefore, are something we should pay attention to this week when the weekday data resumes on Tuesday. But I am not worrying about this breaking the overall trend of falling numbers of new cases.
Deaths, on the other hand, while still a bit mixed, are broadly positive. Last week we were in a similar position as we are with new cases this week. In particular, we were looking at increasing numbers in both Delaware and Virginia while the other three states saw slowly falling numbers.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
In Delaware we have the numbers down a bit, but the longer term trend remains generally up. I will be watching this closely this week. Virginia, however, is an easier, but maybe better explanation? During the course of this past week, Virginia stated that it’s processing death certificates from the post-holiday surge in deaths.
This means the state under-reported deaths earlier this year and so that the curve should have actually been significantly higher. But the positive news in that is that the deaths we are seeing now happened in the past so that deaths today are far lower than are being reported.
And with vaccinations we continue to have good news. The lines below are clearly off the baseline now as the three states we track move towards 10% fully vaccinated.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
It’s not all perfect, as the rate in Pennsylvania appears to have slowed slightly. This after vaccine administrators mistakenly used second doses for first doses. Now the state has to play catch-up.
But in Virginia and Illinois, we continue to see increasing rates. You can see this as the curve is beginning to gradually slope more and more upward instead of the shallow angle we saw for the last few weeks.
Like with new cases, which, while positive, still have a ways to go before we get to summer-like levels that would allow us to head out and socialise, vaccinations have a long way to go.
And importantly, just because someone is vaccinated doesn’t mean society should reopen just for those lucky to get their doses early. We need to wait—or should wait—for higher levels of vaccination before reopening.
Another week, another snowstorm in the Northeast. This winter has been far busier than last, when Philadelphia saw no snow. Unfortunately, whilst people like me enjoy seeing the snow, it’s hampering with testing and vaccination.
Last week we saw some middling signs of improvement, but perhaps partially exaggerated by the closures caused by the storm. When we look back at the last week, despite the impact of a storm later in the week, it’s been a categorically positive week with respect to new cases.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
After the plateaus of the week before, most notably in the straight line in Pennsylvania, this week we saw the line for the seven-day average resume a sharp trajectory down. That isn’t to say we are seeing a slowdown in that reduction of new cases. Illinois best fits that, but we can see slight flattening of the downward curve also in Delaware and New Jersey. In Illinois’ case, that is still welcome as the state approaches early autumn levels of new case rates. In the remaining states, we still have a little ways to go before we reach those levels.
Deaths, on the other hand, remain a mixed bag of results. Last week we talked about a much improved picture from the week before with Delaware and Virginia in particular exhibiting significantly decreased rates.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
This week we saw some reversal of fortune in those two same states. In Delaware, the numbers of deaths have ticked back upwards and the seven-day average has made up about a third of the gains we saw. In Virginia, the upward swing can be largely—though not entirely—attributed to a one-day spike in numbers.
Whilst the other three states continued to see gradual improvements, the question over the coming week will be what trends emerge within Delaware and Virginia. Do the deaths increase and the situation worsen? Or will the increases prove a temporary aberration followed by a return to decreasing numbers of new deaths.
Finally with vaccines
The vaccination curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
The story to follow in Pennsylvania will be how distribution sites mistakenly administered second doses as first. 60,000 people awaiting their second dose will now have to wait—though still within the recommended window—for their second dose whilst 50,000 people will now have to wait for their first dose.
Otherwise, we continue to see an uptick in vaccinations. Last week we saw states make significant gains in their fully vaccinated populations. Virginia had passed 4% and Pennsylvania was about to hit the same milestone. This week begins with Virginia at nearly 5.5% and Pennsylvania almost at 5%, sitting on 4.77%. We need to keep in mind that this excludes any new vaccinations from the city, which doesn’t report vaccination data at the weekend. Illinois is now the lagging state at 4.29%.
