Covid-19 diary: Part 27

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 19, 2021

Nearly every day since Dec. 3, 2020, one of the first things I’ve done in the morning has been to check Covid-19 trends and tweet about them. This grew out of my interest in comparing the pandemic death toll to those of other disasters in American history. (Click on the following links for the second, third and fourth posts in this series.) That pursuit prompted me to construct multiple spreadsheets. One of these regularly imports daily data from The New York Times and until recently also pulled daily records from the now-discontinued COVID Tracking Project.

I’m not an expert, but I do think that I have a general handle on what’s happening with the pandemic in the United States.

New cases have been declining pretty steadily since Jan. 8, when we saw a single-day report of 300,619 diagnoses and a rolling seven-day per diem of 259,570.7 diagnoses, both records. As of Tuesday, the rolling seven-day per diem case load had fallen 78.8 percent, to 54,954.4. The track of Covid-19 deaths has been a bit rockier, but as of Tuesday, the rolling seven-day per diem toll had declined to 1,302.9 lives lost, a 61.1 percent dropoff from Jan. 12’s peak of 3,351.7. We’ve got a ways to go, but this is great news. (You can see these trends by looking at the bar charts on this New York Times page, updated daily.)

Johns Hopkins University reports that Covid-19 hospitalizations are down from a peak of 128,311 the week of Jan. 1 to 40,020 as of the week of March 5. (Click on the button labeled inpatient capacity to find these figures on the weekly hospitalization trends page.) This is also great news!