Oregon Covid numbers end their steep drop
Over the last week or so, the Covid case and hospitalization numbers released by the State of Oregon have leveled off. They had been dropping steadily since about Labor Day, but now they are flattening out. The arrival of cooler weather may have something to do with it, in which case you wonder whether we are not getting ready to head into another winter surge.
Here are the Oregon hospitalization and ICU patient curves for the whole pandemic. It appears that we're currently flattening out, at the start of November, right about where we were in the worst of it last winter:
Here are the new cases reported in the three Oregon counties in the Portland metropolitan area:
I'm omitting the death numbers for now, since the state has told us they're off by quite a bit. But from what I can see, continued vigilance may be warranted.
A reader writes:
ReplyDeleteDo not give up hope yet. On Sept. 2, the seven-day moving average of new cases in Oregon was 2329. Two months later, the number is down to 1064. That is a huge improvement. One can hope that the number will continue to drop (in an irregular way, not in a straight line, of course). If we get hit with a new, powerful variant, all bets are off, however. Cross your fingers.
Breakthrough cases like my own recent one are a thing. You want to catch it while you have the extra edge from the vaccine, not when it has worn off, since that improves your odds by about an order of magnitude. The new drug being approved will give another order of magnitude improvement in the odds if the data are accurate. If so, that will take the death part out of the equation once in widespread use.
ReplyDeleteIt's endemic now and never will go away. Time to learn to deal with it.