Is Covid-19 spiking?

Lot's of talk about the idea that Covid-19 is spiking, or that with the reopening of the country that we are looking at a "second wave". Most of this comes from anecdotal stories, isolated spikes in various areas, and plenty of "health officials" providing dire warnings.

But what does the data show?

The empirical data right now is showing a slow, but steady decline in deaths, with a fairly consistent number of new cases that seem to be neither rising or lowering to any significant degree. There are a handful of states that appear to be showing more cases, while some are going down. But you have to look at these "problem" states individually to really determine if there is actually a problem, or if there are other explanations besides a so-called "second wave".

Take Florida for instance. This has been on the radar of most everyone, but mainly those Covid-19 cheerleaders who seem to "want" to see more cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Florida has seen an increase of cases for the past week or so that is being described in apocalyptic terms. Florida officials have suggested that an increase in testing and differences in reporting methods at least mostly explain the numbers. Obviously, the naysayers are not impressed.

But when you look at the underlying statistics, hospitalizations and deaths, the numbers have been stubbornly consistent. Over the past four weeks, there have been 992, 920, 871, 1379 new hospitalization, and 243, 243, 262, 277 new deaths (with the first numbers the most recent, and the last numbers from three weeks ago).

So, in fact, there has been a slight rise over the last week in hospitalizations, no rise in deaths, and both are down considerably from where it was three weeks ago (when much was still shut down). Would Florida health officials like these numbers to be lower? Of course. But keep in mind that these weekly death numbers are still considerably lower than New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California and a bunch of other states where things appear to be coming down. There would have to be several weeks of highly increased numbers before anyone could suggest that Florida is as bad as the New England and Great Lake states.

Now nobody (and I mean nobody) really knows anymore what will happen as the country reopens and whether or not we will see a second wave. But what the data does tell us is that unless the Covid-19 bug mutates into something different, the people catching it from being out and about are not likely to see many hospitalizations or deaths. If Florida (for instance) reports 2000 cases and those are mainly from the under 45 crowd most likely to be trying to get back to normal, then those people are much less likely to be either hospitalized or die from Covid. This seems to be something that many people fail to acknowledge, but can explain what appears to be a statistical disconnect between cases and the more serious fall out.