The Covids

I've been called many things regarding the covid pandemic, but "optimist" is not one of them.  But even I can't deny that the latest trends are encouraging.

According to the NY Times' statistics, an average of 572 cases per day were reported in Georgia in the last week. Cases have decreased by 43 percent from the average two weeks ago. At the peak last January 19, there were almost 20,000 new cases reported each day.

But the reported number of cases isn't as reliable an indicator as it used to be.  People are increasingly using home testing kits and the big public testing sites are almost all completely closed now.  Fewer of the actual cases are being reported each day, and the 572-case tally is almost asuredly an undercount of the actual number.  

Biased personal observation: more people that I know personally have come down with the covids since last summer than at any other point in this two-year-plus pandemic.  But my personal experience isn't representative of Georgia, much less the United States as a whole.

A useful indicator of the trend is the percentage of positive cases for those tests that are made publicly available.  The test positivity rate in Georgia is currently 6.2%, down from 25% at the end of July and way down from the peak of nearly 40% at the beginning of the year.

Just as important is the number of hospitalizations. As of today, an average of 896 people are hospitalized for covid each day, down 18% from just two weeks ago.  And only 124, or 1 per 100,000, are admitted to the ICU each day.  

Of course, life-and-death is the great matter, and on average, 13 people are dying in Georgia from covid each day. While my heart still breaks for each and every victim, that number is down 36% from two weeks ago, an encouraging trend. Since the beginning of the pandemic, at least 1 in 4 Georgia residents have been infected, a total of 2,825,163 reported cases. At least 1 in 275 residents have died from the coronavirus, for a total of 38,808 deaths.

Impermanence is swift.

So the number of new cases is now down to the level previously seen only in the intervals between the infection spikes.  The percentage of positive cases is approaching an all-time low - at least since the pandemic started.  And the number of hospitalizations and deaths are all down and continuing to drop.

I'm not saying it's over, and I'm not saying we don't need to continue some level of vigilance. But I am saying that things are looking a whole lot better right now.