As America battles through the culture war on race inequality, coronavirus pandemic headlines are re-surfacing in the mass media outlets. What was rarely mentioned over the past three weeks amidst the protests, lootings and destructions, and the Summer-of-Love encampment in downtown Seattle is now again the concern of public health and government officials. To observing and rational Americans, the coronavirus never took a break with the large public gatherings across multiple cities over the past three weeks. In fact, heeding of social distancing, suggested testing and tracing was not spoken to those public gatherings. But on the front of re-opening our economy and resuming some form of normality, the public health and government officials are quick to express concerns on rising cases of COVID-19. So let’s again look at the data and see where we are with COVID-19 BY THE NUMBERS!
In a previous post, we provided the provisional numbers from CDC from 2/1-5/9 and analyzed those numbers based on age and sex. In addition, we looked at the largest patient data set from New York state and analyzed the prevalence of pre-existing conditions with COVID-19 deaths. We will perform the same analyses for the provisional numbers from CDC from 2/1-6/6 and also the latest patient data set from New York state, one month later.
The key take-away’s from the analyses are:
- Nothing has changed with COVID-19. The majority of patients who die are the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions.
- Children continue to have negligible risk of COVID-19 death; in comparison, there have been 169 pediatric deaths from influenza.[i]
- In addition, more than 40,000 residents of nursing homes / long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19, representing over one-third of all deaths![ii]
Over the past three months, America has increased its testing capacity greatly. In the last month, we have performed from 300,000 to over 500,000 new COVID-19 tests daily. If we look at “% New Positives” (percentage of new confirmed positive COVID-19 cases divided by new tests performed daily), the trend is plateauing or decreasing very moderately around 5%. More importantly, the trend for “New Deaths” daily is decreasing. There could always be certain “bumps” because of sampling and/or random events. It is always better to look at a 7-Day moving average over a substantial period of time. Statistically, the trends for “New Positives” relative to tests done and “New Deaths” daily are heading in the desired direction! This is ALL happening in the midst of the increased re-opening initiatives across America, the recent Memorial Holiday weekend, and the ongoing protests and social unrest throughout large metropolitan cities.
[i] https://www.rochesterregional.org/news/2020/01/flu-season-2020
[ii] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/06/01/coronavirus-nursing-home-deaths-top-40-600/5273075002/