Sunday, January 24, 2021

TEXAS CORONAVIRUS UPDATE AS OF 2021/1/23

 

UPDATE: Please check an update to this chart for February 26, 2021

https://californiaswansong.blogspot.com/2021/02/texas-coronavirus-update-as-of-february.html

The daily hospitalizations have settled down, from what I can tell. I didn't check every day, but spot checked a couple of dates. I don't know what the reason was for the change.  Probably Texas DHS were re-defining a few things.  I could ask them.  I have their email address and they do respond to my questions, which is very nice.

Like I mentioned before in a prior update to a post, the daily deaths have been slowly rising.  Nothing like it was in the beginning.  The conclusions regarding this have not changed.  A treatment protocol by now has been established - no more shots in the dark.  Also, there is herd immunity.  I add herd immunity because the virus had established itself as highly contagious. Refer to the chart to see the rapid rise in deaths and hospitalizations in late May onward.  But now, the rise in deaths (slope) is far far slower. We can imply from this that the virus has lost some of its potency.

If you look to the far right of the chart, I show a smooth gradiated shaded area.  I still use the cutoff point for reliable data of a change in deaths of less than 10 on the latest day, but I add an additional week to capture outliers. I gradiated it because it was unclear if the added weak should be counted or not.  I didn't want to blot it out entirely. But for sure, they are MORE up to date than the last few weeks/days.

The last few days show the daily hospitalizations topping out (see dashed oval in chart).  We need to see a few more weeks of data to determine if we have an actual trend. 

Daily deaths are represented as a 7 day moving average for greater clarity.








Thursday, January 14, 2021

Update on Texas Coronavirus statistics

I am still following the Texas coronavirus statistics. This Excel spreadsheet is directly available here: https://dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus/TexasCOVID19CaseCountData.xlsx 

My comments regarding these numbers so far are: 

1. I haven't gone back to look at it, but at some point in December or early January, the TDSHS updated the hospitalizations. The assumption early on was the hospitalization numbers were fixed and would not be updated. Well, that was not entirely correct. It looks like the numbers are fixed now.....for now. I can't determine what they will do in the future. 

 2. The daily fatalities are taking longer for them to completely update for any day. What looked like to me that daily deaths had flattened was not correct. They are slowly climbing. My calculations show the rate of deaths is at only one fourth the rate of the 2020 May/June time frame. Very....very slow. What I do now is add a week taking the date of incompleted data back a bit further to basically remove it from the analysis. I hated to do this because it delays any conclusion we can draw of what is ahead.  I think no conclusion is better than the wrong conclusion. 

3. My rough calculations for the rate of growth in daily hospitalizations show that it would take about four months for them to completely max out hospital bed utilization. That max-out date would bring us to the May/June timeframe. Just at the point we would probably start seeing a drop in hospitalizations and even daily fatalities.