It is the other metrics that are less trustworthy.Well, the democrats are finally starting to follow the medical science after all this time. Overall, I thought Biden's speech on Covid was not very good (I thought the whole speech was pretty poor as Biden is a not a good public speaker and made a lot of mistakes). Notice how he didn't actually declare it over and I am not sure exactly what he did declare other than he is ordering a lot of pills from Pfizer (the same drug company's that he railed against in the same speech for ripping off consumers) and you can get some free masks and free at home test kits and free vaccines and free pills. And we have to get kids back to school (not sure many kids are virtual anymore so that didn't make any sense). But at least I think he said enough that schools should now not require masks and business should not either so hopefully in the next couple of weeks we start seeing the signs going into retail stores and business come down requiring (or highly suggesting) masks. Only place left where I am waiting for the mask mandates to come off would be public transportation and airplanes, will be interesting to know how long it will take for that to occur.
From a pure number standpoint, they are really just bottoming out. Still on hard curves down for all the major metrics of daily positives, hospitalizations, and fatalities.
Daily positives 7 day average is 57,9737, last time we were there was in late July. Last year at this time that number was 69,000.
Hospitalizations 7 day average is 41,898, which is equal to the November dip and similar late July numbers. Last year at this time that number was 45,000. Note with this metric is that we are still on a really hard curve down with week over week numbers being on the decline by 30% and the curve has not started to smooth out.
New Hospital admissions 7 day average (which is probably the leading metric right now of where covid as to me is the most pure value) is 4,619, last time we were there was July 24th. Last year at this time that number was 5,645. And like the hospitalization numbers, new hospital admissions are still on a 30% week over week downward hard decline.
I think by the end of March if we continue on this trend, we could easily be pushing the all time low Covid hospital rate of new admissions of 1800 from this last summer's June timeframe.
And then there is the fatality number which the 7 day average is at 1,563 compared to last year at this time of 1900. This is the number which just is not making sense. We have gone from 800,000+ daily positives to 69,000 which is a 90%+ decline. New hospital admissions have gone from a high of 21,484 during the peak of Omicron to now 4,619 which is a 80% decline. Yet for fatalities we have gone from an Omicron peak of 2673 to the current 1563 which is only a 42% decline. So as we have talked, the fatality metric is just not making sense compared to the other metrics we have.
Lots of ways to manipulate cases and hospitalizations.
Much harder to manipulate deaths.