I'm going to have to break my own rule about not talking about deaths, just to set the record straight. It is unequivocal that death rates in the US are rising rapidly (the 7-day avg went from about 700 to 1200 over the past 2-3 weeks) and will continue to rise rapidly until they're very likely at least in the 2000-2500 per day rate we saw in April, given that cases continue to skyrocket and as always, hospitalizations are starting to skyrocket and deaths lag cases by 2-4 weeks and hospitalizations by 1-2 weeks.
We're in for horrific pain from now through at least January, when hopefully we'll start seeing the effects of vaccines and antibody treatments. We should expect to have close to 400K COVID deaths by the end of January if we average ~2000/day until then - only much more effective masking/distancing (and possible targeted shutdowns) will reduce this somewhat. Note that many European countries, right now, have death rates that are equivalent to 2500-3000 per day on a US per capita basis. I hope I'm wrong, but for what it's worth, I was pretty accurate on my predictions for deaths from this summer's wave 2 in the US.
𝗨𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗢𝗩𝗜𝗗 𝗶𝗻 𝗡𝗝/𝗡𝗬/𝗨𝗦 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀
While cases in NJ/NY are going up somewhat quickly, one has to remember that they're not going up at the rate we saw in March/April and are still less in total than in March/April, when considering that actual cases were likely at least 2-4X more than reported back then (since we had minimal testing back then).
However, looking at hospitalization rates is much more illustrative of the extent of the current outbreak, since hospitalizations aren't subject to the wide variability related to testing variability. And they're about 1/4 what they were back in April in NJ and less than that in NY - although they are rising, but I'm hoping they'll level off at less than half the April rate (since cases appear to be peaking), which, combined with about 1/2 the death rate per hospitalization now vs. what we saw in March/April, that would work out to 1/4 the death rate peak of April. Still sucks, but not as badly. We'll see.
In contrast, as per my post from a week ago (above) and a few before that, the rest of the US is either already in or about to enter a world of hurt with cases, hospitalizations and deaths skyrocketing and hospitals being overrun in some locations. I'd expect to see US deaths top out in the 2000-2500 per day range and maybe even up to 3000/day, i.e., beyond what we saw in March/April (which was about 2200/day on a 7-day avg) and there's nothing that can be done to stop that now, given where we are in cases.
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The "good" news is that if we follow the trajectory in most of the major European countries, which have seen huge peaks in recent weeks, but are now declining, we'll peak soon and then decline, as they have done. Deaths in these European countries have generally peaked, while ours have not, but should in the next couple of weeks, as deaths lag cases by 2-4 weeks and hospitalizations by 1-2 weeks, typically. As per the graphs below comparing the US to selected European countries, we're somewhere in the middle on cases and deaths, but still rising.
And we should start to see vaccines rolling out by mid-December, at least for health care workers and then high risk workers/people. Hopefully, most who want a vaccine will be able to get one by the end of April and the pandemic will be mostly over. But it'll have been far worse here and in many other countries than it needed to be, if we had simply followed our own pandemic playbook, although that's not worth rehashing here.
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