Are we on the verge of a second wave of coronavirus infections? Is there a spike in infections in states that reopened first?
The only way to answer that question is to watch as the data roll in. Arguably the best data to look at to see if a second wave is beginning are the hospitalization numbers. The media frequently reports the biggest and most dramatic numbers, often devoid of context. The number of cases has been reported regularly since the early days of the pandemic, and yet we know that the number of cases can be misleading.Recommended VideosPutin Says Russia Faces ‘New And Grueling Phase’ Of PandemicPauseUnmuteDuration 0:44/Current Time 0:39Loaded: 100.00% FullscreenUp Next
NOW PLAYINGPutin Says Russia Faces ‘New And Grueling Phase’ Of PandemicUP NEXT96% Of Prisoners In Four State Prisons Test Positive For COVID-19, But Don’t Have SymptomsBreath-Holding, Water Sipping Won’t Do Anything For COVID-19. Here’s What To Do InsteadChina’s second wave? Beijing faces new lockdown as cases spike in Chinese capitalFauci: US Is Nowhere Near Herd Immunity YetThe CDC Wants All Adult Americans To Get Tested For Hepatitis CKorea Discovers Some Coronavirus Patients Ready For Discharge Are Testing Positive AgainStudy: COVID-19 Patients Treated With Hydroxychloroquine At Higher Risk Of Death
As more people are tested and re-tested for the virus, more results will come back positive, with the current number of confirmed cases exceeding 2 million in the U.S. But if we know anything, it is that increases in the number of confirmed cases do not accurately convey how quickly and widely the virus is spreading. Antibody tests and even the examination of sewage in some cities suggest that the number of infections is likely much higher than the number of confirmed cases.
But on the other side, some of the confirmed cases are double-counted in some states partly because both antibody and active virus tests are being counted separately but then combined in the total number of cases. While the antibody tests have been criticized for their false positive rate, another criticism has been that the antibody studies can underreport infection rates because they are not sensitive enough to detect a past mild infection.
Overall, because the bulk of testing is focused on people who are the sickest and who face the greatest exposure, it seems reasonable to conclude that the true number of U.S. infections is substantially higher than the reported figure. But an attempt to estimate the true number of infections would be a little better than a guess.
And this presents a problem with the daily updates. To say that a particular state or city is seeing a “spike” in cases is to say that recently they have had an uptick in positive test results. That could be due to more testing and more ways of testing, or it could be a hint of growth in the infection rate.
Better Data are Available
Rather than focus on test results, i.e. “cases,” it would make more sense to focus on how the virus affects society and our institutions, particularly the strain the virus puts on health care facilities and health care providers. An obvious measure, tracked since the beginning of the pandemic, is the number of deaths. As I and others at AIER have noted, the number of deaths is hard to interpret without important context.
The coronavirus is obviously deadly, but how deadly it seems to depend greatly on how it enters a population and the characteristics of that population. The virus has been far deadlier in New York than it has been in California, and has been most deadly in U.S. long-term care facilities. Among children, the coronavirus is considerably less deadly than seasonal influenza.
Nonetheless, deaths tell us something important about the virus’s impact on society. They profoundly affect entire social networks and are rightly emphasized in pandemic reporting.
When it comes to seeing how things are going now, whether the pandemic is growing worse or fading, deaths are a lagging indicator. They do not begin to spike until infections have already been accelerating rapidly for many days, and they do not decline until well after the virus’s spread has slowed.
The chart below shows that overall, deaths are clearly declining, although there is a weekly cycle where Sundays seem to result in relatively low death counts and Tuesdays and Wednesdays usually have the highest reported numbers. Overall, the past two weeks have had lower death totals than have been seen in the two months prior. But if a second wave were coming soon, we would not see the deaths from it yet.
Here is another look from the Washington Post.
In addition to deaths, more attention has shifted to measuring coronavirus-related hospitalizations. Frustratingly, these data tend not to go back as far as numbers on confirmed cases or deaths, but in most states, there are hospitalization figures going back over two months. The hospital data are measured in two ways, the first being a cumulative measure, similar to the way confirmed cases and deaths are measured.
The number can only go up as more hospitalizations are added to the total. From that number, the daily number of hospitalizations can be plotted; however, that number is very noisy because the numbers are submitted at the state level in a variety of ways and do not seem to reflect the true numbers per day.
In other words, the hospitalization numbers seem to come in clumps. They can be reported as weekly totals or weekly averages, as well. But a weakness of the cumulative data is that they do not tell us much about the burden on hospitals and health care workers. The total number of coronavirus hospitalizations increased dramatically, from zero to nearly 60,000 in a month nationally, and stayed high for weeks afterward. The chart below shows that the decrease in hospitalization has been fairly steady, and overall there is far less strain on the health care system than there was in mid-April.
The northeastern U.S. was hit hardest, but most states are either seeing declining or flat trends in hospitalizations, with a few notable exceptions such as North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona. But in those states, the number of hospitalizations is still relatively low, a fraction of the totals that New York and New Jersey were seeing in April. Claims that Alabama, Georgia, and Florida are emerging “hotspots” are not supported by the hospitalization numbers despite media reports to the contrary.
There are some parts of the country still in the midst of the first wave of coronavirus infections, states that had very low numbers of hospitalizations and deaths in April but are now beginning to see the virus spread more quickly. But those states are unlikely to see the kind of spread Northeastern states did, and there is hope the virus can be far less deadly going forward if policies can be implemented to better protect the elderly and vulnerable, especially those living in long-term care facilities.
The World Is In Big Trouble, for Those That Believe We Will Go Back to Some Sense of Normal Life Here on Earth, You Will Be Sadly Disappointed, Seven and Half Years of Hell on Earth Which Began January 1, 2020
“Our courts oppose the righteous, and justice is nowhere to be found. Truth stumbles in the streets, and honesty has been outlawed” (Isa. 59:14, NLT)…We Turned Our Backs On GOD, Now We Have Been Left To Our Own Devices, Enjoy…
While Mainstream Media Continues to Push a False Narrative, Big Tech Has Keep the Truth From Coming out by Shadow Banning Conservatives, Christians, and Like-Minded People, Those Death Attributed to the Coronavirus Is a Result of Those Mentioned, They Truly Are Evil…
StevieRay Hansen
Editor, HNewsWire.com
Watchmen does not confuse truth with consensus The Watchmen does not confuse God’s word with the word of those in power…
In police-state fashion, Big Tech took the list of accused (including this site), declared all those named guilty and promptly shadow-banned, de-platformed or de-monetized us all without coming clean about how they engineered the crushing of dissent, Now more than ever big Tech has exposed there hand engaging in devious underhanded tactics to make the sinister look saintly, one of Satan’s greatest weapons happens to be deceit…
The accumulating death toll from Covid-19 can be seen minute-by-minute on cable news channels. But there’s another death toll few seem to care much about: the number of poverty-related deaths being set in motion by deliberately plunging millions of Americans into poverty and despair.
American health care, as we call it today, and for all its high-tech miracles, has evolved into one of the most atrocious rackets the world has ever seen. By racket, I mean an enterprise organized explicitly to make money dishonestly.
All the official reassurances won’t be worth a bucket of warm spit. The Globals are behind the CoronaVirus, It Is a Man-Made Bioweapon.
For those of you who care, Google and your favorite social media platforms have misled you, and now we all pay a heavy price for trusting the ungodly, Google and company knew exactly what they were doing, removing our history while preparing you to accept the New World Order playbook, Enjoy
Paul indicates “the man of lawlessness” (Lucifer, the devil) will put on a big show with counterfeit miracles, signs, and wonders. (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12) Millions of evil angels (actually demons) will herald the fake news, “Almighty God has arrived! Come out to see him! He has come to establish the kingdom of God on Earth and there will be a thousand years of peace and prosperity for everyone!” The wicked will be excited by this announcement. Yet, we can only understand this deception if we learn the events that occur prior to the Antichrist’s appearance. The first four trumpets will devastate Earth and ruin its many infrastructures. People who live then will be in very primitive, miserable conditions. I believe the devil and his angels will appear about two and one-half years after the first four trumpets occur. Consider the devil’s appearance as John saw it:
In John’s day, the Abyss was thought to be a mysterious region located beneath a flat Earth. People believed that demons dwelled in the Abyss and volcanoes served as chimneys for the fires that burned down there. The shaft (or bottomless pit) of the Abyss was considered to be a hole that went through the flat Earth. In this case, the star is Lucifer who was cast out of Heaven. As the angel king of the Abyss, he is given a key so that he and his followers can escape. This language indicates that Jesus deliberately and precisely controls when the Antichrist appears.
John saw a representation of Lucifer and his demons in the same way that he saw the seven-headed beast in Revelation 13:1. If you remember, the seven-headed beast looked like a leopard, but it had feet like a bear and a mouth like a lion. These features are representations that describe Babylon’s powers. Lucifer and his demons will not physically look like locusts having scorpion tails. Instead, the devil and his angels will be brilliant, glorious beings with a human-like appearance, because, like mankind, they were made in God’s image. (Genesis 1:26; Job 38:7) The demons from the Abyss will be much larger and more powerful than humans. People will not be able to control, stop, or kill them. God will release them from the Abyss and give them the power to rule over the whole world for about fourteen months.
God only releases the devil and his angels from the spirit realm (the Abyss), after the world has rejected the clearest evidence of His will and higher authority. When the fifth trumpet occurs, Lucifer will confront each wicked person with the clearest evidence of his will and authority. Standing about fifteen feet tall and deceptively cloaked in brilliant light and charming benevolence, the devil will tell the wicked that he is “Almighty God.” I believe that Lucifer is physical “15 feet tall” using the following texts. Psalm 8:3-5 reveals that Jesus created man “smaller” or “shorter” than the angels and 1 Kings 6:23-26 documents that Solomon constructed a life-sized likeness of the two angels for the Most Holy Place.
To prove the lie that he is “Almighty God,” the devil will call fire down from the sky on command. (Revelation 13:13) The devil will declare he has come to establish God’s kingdom on Earth and he invites everyone to join him for 1,000 years of peace and prosperity. The devil is called “the false prophet” for this reason. Behind the scenes, demons will arrest and torture everyone caught refusing to worship the devil for blasphemy and insubordination.
My job is protecting children. It has taken me from big cities to rural outposts, from ghettos to penthouses, and from courtrooms, into demonic battlefields. But whatever the venue, the truth remains constant: Some humans intentionally hurt children. They commit unspeakable acts—for their pleasure, their profit, or both. StevieRay Hansen, CEO The 127 Faith Foundation
