Will it Get Worse?

A quick update is in order because it appears CDC doesn’t have “final” data so the low numbers that were reported over the weekend were updated to be more like the rest of the week. The actual week to week increase was still down but now only slightly.

So let’s assume this is driven by Delta and not like the summer wave of last year. Maybe the best model for that is the UK. Here is a graph showing the 10 day moving average of cases along with daily reported cases. All data taken from the WHO.

The ironic thing is that the UK ended all restrictions on July 19th even as cases were still rising. Now they are falling and pretty rapidly. We can come up with two takeaways. First, the wave lasted just about eight weeks. Second, the peak was less than the winter.

So now we can try to compare the US to the UK. It is not an exact comparison since the UK did not have the April bump that the US did but the 10 day average of cases hit a minimum on June 21. I don’t want to graph actual numbers because of the population difference. Cases per million would be best but what I’m going to show is comparison to the minimum. That gives the graph shown below.

In the UK, the 10 day average of cases went from 2285 on May 25th and hit a peak of 44708 on July 23rd. The US minimum was 10980 on June 21. If we were exactly following the UK, we’d hit a peak of 214821 daily cases on August 19th. That would for sure freak everyone out.

Now, the US line has been running under the UK line and they’ve been roughly parallel so it seems unlikely that we hit the same peak. If the current trends hold, we’d be seeing 150000-160000 new cases a day by late August. That would be in line with the current difference between the UK and US. It would also be far above last summer’s wave.

I don’t see how we can get there if the biggest increases remain in the South. We’d have to start seeing big increases in other places as well.

Visually, it looks like rates in the UK really started to accelerate right at this time. We have to see if the US pattern continues to follow.

Is it just a summer wave that peaks in a week or two or is a delta wave that keeps going for another month? Hopefully, we will know more by the end of the week. I will just say that in my non-southern state, we just hit a new high in cases yesterday. One point doesn’t make a trend but it certainly isn’t a good thing.