Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 19-Dec-2020 edition

 Prediction check in time.

  • By today, the week of Dec 6-Dec 11 would have seen no weekday below 5,000 new cases
    • This prediction turned out not to come true... Friday from that week still stands just short of the total with 4.898.  
  • By today, the week of Dec 6-Dec 11 would have seen an average of 4,750 new cases per day or higher
    • Great news: we haven't reached this mark.  We sit at 4,601.8 as of today!
  • By today, the death count would reach 11,500.
    • Sadly, we reached that level earlier this week and are now at 11.640
  • By Christmas, we will reach 12,000 deaths
    • We're still seeing deaths at a lower rate than what would get us here, but, so that's good, but what's bad is that we're also still seeing daily death counts that are higher than we did a couple weeks and double what we saw at the start of November
Summary: While we're still doing poorly and far worse than we were at the end of November, we're doing better than I had predicted so we're not getting worse as quickly as I predicted.  We're sort of holding steady in a really bad place.  Just how bad?  
  • So far in December we've increased our hospital use by 62% and just in the last 7 days increased it by 15%.
  • So far in December we've increased our ICU use by 60% and just in the last 7 days increased it by 15% as well.
  • Somewhat surprisingly, we've reduced our intubated count by 2% so far this month, though just in the last 7 days we've increased it by 15%!
  • The average daily deaths went from not seeing a single week above 20 from June 29 through the end of October to low 20's for the first couple weeks of November to 27 the week of Nov 15, 33 the week of Nov 22, 42 the week of Nov 29, 50 the week of Dec 6 and for the first half of the week of Dec 13 (the portion we have semi-reliable numbers for) we're at 47 (a slight decrease from last week but not enough to bring us back to how we were doing the first week of December).
  • The average daily cases are still twice as high as they were at our first peak and, with that being at 4600+, a dip of 26/day between the preceding week and last week seems pretty insignificant to me, especially with Monday this past week already at 6,037 with days to go before it stops increasing and already it's the 3rd highest single-day increase.
Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed. 

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