Category Archives: Uncategorized

Case Update, March 17th, 2021; Still higher new case numbers than Wave 1?

Uncategorized

This is a case update. New cases continue to fall for the US, California, and San Diego. There was a spike in cases for the US on March 8th. At the same time, there is a spike in cases in most counties in Missouri. The spike was so consistent across the state, and stops on every nearby state line, that my suspicion is that this represents a reporting problem rather than actual new cases in every county in the state. Sometimes labs or public health departments don’t report on time and allow new case reports to stack up. When they finally report the results, it looks like a big outbreak. I can’t prove that this happened in Missouri, but it’s my suspicion. I couldn’t find any news about this phenomena, and the Missouri state health department shows no spike in cases during this time.

Graph is by me, from data collected from Johns Hopkins University COVID site.
Endcoronavirus County Level Map, March 16th, 2021
Endcoronavirus State Level Data, March 17th, 2021.

My total case number graph for California assumes that patients recover after 17 days. But today’s number gives a unbelievably low 6500 active cases in California. California doesn’t report recovered cases, so I’ve been using San Diego Counties numbers and extrapolating an estimate for California. Right now, San Diego’s reported recovered numbers suggests a 22 day recovery time instead of 17. If you use 22 days for California, current active cases for California is 28,000. This is why I tell you exactly how I get my information, so if it’s wrong or suspicious, you can decide for yourself if you believe my source.

Graph is by me, from data collected from Johns Hopkins University COVID site.
Graph is by me, from data collected from Johns Hopkins University COVID site. “Active Confirmed Cases” numbers are calculated based on the assumption that patients confirmed to have SARS-2 virus at least 17 days ago have recovered. Given this criteria, the active cases are crazy low right now, probably too low to be real.
Graph is by me, from data collected from Johns Hopkins University COVID site. “Active Confirmed Cases” numbers are calculated based on the assumption that patients confirmed to have SARS-2 virus at least 17 days ago have recovered. If I change this assumption to 22 days for the last few weeks, matching the estimate from San Diego County, active cases in California is 28,000.
Graph is by me, from data collected from San Diego County Public Health. See also regularly updated slides from SD County.
Graph is by me, from data collected from San Diego County Public Health. See also regularly updated slides from SD County. “Active Confirmed Cases” numbers are reported by San Diego County. Because our new active case numbers are getting low, I’ve switched to a logarithmic view. This emphasizes small values and makes them easier to see. Notice that the case number on the left now go up 10 fold with each higher line on the graph.

Still more than in Wave 1? For the last few weeks, I’ve been saying that while our numbers are getting really low, the numbers are still higher than in Wave 1 from last April. A friend pointed out that last Spring we weren’t really testing much, so maybe the cases were higher. That’s an excellent point and absolutely true. In fact I have several friends that were really sick during the Winter of 19/20, some after spending time with friends or family from Asia. So yes, there may have been far more cases last Spring than we know.

Don’t fear, but be smart,
Erik

Case Update: April 13th

All Articles, Uncategorized

Originally posted April 13th, 2020, on Facebook

Friends!

I have another good news/bad news post for you today. First the good news. Yesterday, 8pm on April 12th, the rate of new infections for the world, the US, California, and San Diego County, were all below 5%! Our efforts are paying off!

Some of you may wonder if this is a Sunday Effect, a lowering of new case numbers just because it’s a Sunday, and there may fewer people performing tests that day. While it’s certainly true that there have been fewer new cases on Sunday, I noticed that in past weeks, a Sunday drop has often been followed by a lower rate for the entire next week. Last week for example, the rate was below 10% on Sunday, a big drop, but remained low for the entire next week. If this trend holds, then we may have rates near 5% for the entire next week.

The bad news isn’t really new, but rather a new study of the Basic Reproductive Number (R0). This number is a measure of infectiousness and is an attempt to calculate the average number of people that an infected person will pass the virus to. For a typical flu, this number is 1.28. For the first SARS virus in 2002, it was around 3. As recently revealed in a pre-publication paper [Sanche et al. High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2. July 2020, pre-print captured April 13th, 2020. Em. Inf. Dis. 6(7)], the actual R0 value is 5.7, twice as high as originally thought, and 4.5 times more infectious than the typical flu.

Early on, there was a lot of discussion on whether this virus was spread by droplet transmission (coughing and sneezing) or by aerosol transmission (singing, laughing, shouting, even just talking). The new paper, along with several stories in the news, suggests that SARS-2 is indeed spread at least to some degree by aerosol transmission.

So here’s the take away from this post. We are doing better, but we’ll have to be very careful how we “go back to normal”. The virus has the potential of springing back to life if we just go back to normal right away. If people are to go back to work anytime in the next few weeks, we will need to remain diligent, yes, possibly wearing masks at work, and do wider spread testing to find infected people. Stay tuned on this evolving situation!

Don’t fear, but be smart!
Erik

PS Pre-published journal articles have not yet received final approval and may change before publication!