COVID Continues

COVID continues.

COVID disease is a real threat to personal health.  Also the disease is a threat to political sensibility.  Some state governments are using the disease as a call to government control and ineffective public health action.  They must be seen as doing something, even if the something is nonsensical and wrong for political freedom.

Which leaves the question: What is really happening on the disease front?

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Let's look at the COVID information from the US government Center for Disease Control. When considering these items, remember that COVID is a respiratory illness, and resembles, but is not the same as, influenza.

Nationally, levels of influenza-like illness ( ILI ) remain below baseline for the tenth week and in all 10 surveillance regions for the past eight to eleven weeks. However, several parts of the nation reported increases in percentage of visits for ILI and COVID-like illness.

The public has been changing its behavior is seeking health care, first in using telemedicine and not visiting the emergency room for minor illness. Socially we are getting used to the idea of staying 6 feet back and masking up.

Still COVID infections have spread.  How serious is it?

Hospitalizations

Cumulative COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates since March 1, 2020, are updated weekly. The overall cumulative COVID-19 hospitalization rate is 98.4 per 100,000, with the highest rates in people aged 65 years and older (297.6 per 100,000) and 50-64 years (148.6 per 100,000).

COVID 19 rate per CDC

You can see that the overall COVID hospitalization rate is up about 20% from one month ago.  The kind of good-bad news is the rate of increase in infection is definitely tapering off.

Mortality

Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 (PIC) decreased from 9.5% during week 24 to 6.9% during week 25 but remained above baseline. This is the ninth week of a declining percentage of deaths due to PIC, but this can always change as more death certificates are processed, particularly for recent weeks.

COVID 19 death rate improvement per CDC

The outlook appears to be improving.  The red line indicating death is still going down.  That means although more people are getting COVID, they are then getting better.

Keep doing what you are doing, people.  Once again, humanity will dodge the bullet.

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All the data on this page is abstracted from the Centers for Disease Control website