The COVID Digest, 13Nov2021

Winter is coming

This week we are definitely seeing cases go up nationally. With cases come hospitalizations and deaths and we are very early in the cold weather months when people tend to gather indoors. So this is a worrisome trend for sure.

While the Delta wave started in Missouri and took off in the South, it is spreading elsewhere in the country now. But the South is not out of the woods. In fact, there are some metrics where things are leveling off at a very high rate. Today’s newsletter will discuss national and regional trends, Georgia data, and my exciting news about getting my youngest son vaccinated.

The next three images come from the New York Times COVID Tracker. First, we can see cases since the beginning of the pandemic. You can see the initial arrival of COVID-19 in the US in March/April 2020. Then you can see the summer surge that hit the south in July/August of 2020. After that, the biggest surge of all was the winter surge that affected the entire United States. The peak of that surge was shortly after the approval of vaccines and those vaccines helped to hasten the descent from the peak and drive case counts to all time lows in June 2021. It really looked like we had figured this pandemic out. Then Delta came and infected as many unvaccinated people as it could reach in the South. You can see that the initial Delta wave that took the South created a case count that was 69% as high as the winter surge which affected the entire country. Now, if you look in the most recent weeks, you can see that cases have leveled off and begun to increase. The case count now is 535% higher than where we were before the Delta wave began.

We’ve been here before. We’ve leveled off at a much higher rate than where the previous surge began. It happened in June 2020 and September 2020. Look what happened in the subsequent surges. It meant that the next surge was bigger than the one before. It is really dangerous for us to be leveling off at such a high level.