The situation in the U.S. reminds me of this post from the time when Italy was slammed by the pandemic's first wave. Every day brings news of a new record of daily deaths.
Deaths being a lagging indicator, they don't tell us about the current level of alarm but what was happening weeks ago. Thus, record deaths are not news. Record deaths follow from record hospitalizations, which follow from record cases.
Deaths from coronavirus is an example of what I've been calling "statistical gravity". People who decided to travel and assemble during the holidays set off a chain of events: cases rise, hospitalizations rise and inevitably deaths rise.
Here is a picture of hospitalizations in the U.S. since September (from the valuable CovidTracking Project):
To establish the cadence, we can look for the inflection point, in mid October, when the cases started to surge in this current wave. This maps to the inflection point in the curve of deaths (see below) in early November, so the time lag between hospitalizations and deaths may be around 2 weeks.
With a two-week lag, the deaths we're witnessing now are correlated with the hospitalizations from two weeks ago (post Christmas). The deaths in the next two weeks are predictable by looking at what happened to hospitalizations post Christmas. In the first chart, we learned that hospitalizations went up by 10 percent in about two weeks so we expect deaths to rise by another 10 percent in the next two weeks.
Yes, the U.S. death tolls will be breaking records for at least two more weeks. The numbers will likely continue rising beyond those two weeks, as a similar analysis looking at the growth in cases will show. When will deaths decline? Watch when cases stop growing.
Comments