Something's Hinky About The COVID Data

I've never stopped checking the daily Los Angeles County COVID statistics. The graph above is a screen shot from today's report. While other graphs show sharp increaes in positive tests and hospitalizations, there's been no eqwuivalent rise in deaths. The graph is based on seven-day averages to compensate for daily fluctuation. By early June, the averages reached a floor of about four deaths per day in the county of over 10 million. Since then, they've fluctuated between two and four, with no increase equivalent to those for positive teats and hospitalizations.

Among other things, it's hard not to conclude that whatever the reason for an increase in hospitalizations, there are far fewer deaths resulting from them. So I went to find a graph of total COVID deaths in the US. Here it is at right (click on all the images for larger copies). A key takeaway is that, if in the past the public health authorities took cases as a leading indicator of deaths, so far, this doesn't seem to be happening with the delta variant.

As you can see, there's an uptick in the cases graph at right that simply doesn't appear on the deaths graph above it. These were taken from screen prints of web searches, both using New York Times data, within minutes of each other this morning. A smaller takeaway is that the uptick in cases that had Dr Walensky in tears on national TV last April, which she took as a leading indicator of deaths, was in fact never reflected in any actual increase in deaths. (It's worth revisiting what she and Dr Fauci said then, which I covered at the time in this post.) It's also worth noting that deaths began to decline in mid-January nationally, well before significant numbers of people were fully vaccinated.

It's hard to avoid a conclusion that as the pandemic proceeded, aftrer mid-January 2021, the disease itself became less fatal, and medical treatments became more effective. It's also hard to disagree with conclusions by variouis observers that herd immunity based on people who were already infected but had recovered was an important factor in the overall improvement.

I also ran across an intriguimig story at the Foundation for Economic Educdation, Despite ‘Delta’ Alarmism, US COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Harvard and Stanford Professors Explain. Rather than using raw totals as the graphs above do, this graph from the story normalizes the data to deaths per million, but it draws a very similar conclusion.

[T}he actual number of COVID-19 deaths is at a nadir. Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff pointed this out on Twitter, writing that “In [the] USA, COVID mortality is now the lowest since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.”

He shared this graph [the one at right] from OurWorldInData which clearly shows how COVID deaths per million are at, relatively speaking, extreme lows. Far more people were dying from COVID-19 months ago as we were winding down restrictions than are dying today as some call to reinstate them.

. . . Now, some would cite rising COVID-19 case counts or hospitalizations in certain parts of the country as evidence that the pandemic is indeed once again spiraling out of control. But many COVID-19 cases recorded as positive are either asymptomatic or come with very mild symptoms—especially the cases confirmed among vaccinated individuals—so high case counts are not necessarily proof of a serious problem. Hospitalizations are concerning, yes, but primarily insofar as they lead to high numbers of deaths, which, thankfully, is not the case so far with the Delta variant.

Others would say that deaths are a “lagging indicator” that come in several weeks after the increased spread of the disease. But the Delta variant has been spreading in the US for months now, and deaths have remained relatively flat, in part due to widespread vaccination.

I think a major difference between now and 2020 is that the population is getting smarter and will push back more readily against new calls for controls. Governors like DeSantis and Abbott will publicly resist reinstatment of masking, social distance, and whatever else, and the problem for the public health authorities will be that there will be no difference in statistics between states like Texas and Florida and the rest of the country.

Why the calls for reinstatement are coming is another question, which i'll tackle tomorrow if nothing intervenes.