Here is the Arizona pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended, and it's not good:
Cases are skyrocketing. Excluding last week, the highest one-week increase in new cases per 100K (either Maricopa County or statewide) was 15.9 on August 1. So rates have doubled over the last week (again) and they are over four times as high as the previous highest one-week change since I have been doing this summary.
Worse, according to data from the
ASU Biodesign Dashboard we have exceeded the peak case rate from last year. The 7-day average of new cases was 9,809 on January 12, 2021. Yesterday it was 10,275.
To get a sense of how fast cases are spiking, have a look at a plot of the new cases seven-day average:
The only bit of good news here is that the seven day-average of deaths per 100K is not spiking—yet—with fractional increases over the last week. However, we need to keep in mind that deaths often trail cases and hospitalizations.
New Charts
You can see this in the first of two new charts I am adding as of this week (data form the ASU dashboard). I have added these because there is some evidence that Omicron may cause less severe disease than Delta, and if so these are the metrics where that should show up.
Here is the seven day-average of new cases (blue) plotted alongside the seven-day average of new deaths (red). Note that these are not per 100K, as they are in the table above, because we're not trying to compare geographic regions.
While cases are going up, deaths aren't at this point. An epidemiologist I spoke to said it's very difficult to correlate deaths with cases because of a variety of factors, one being that it takes widely varying lengths of time—up to 60 days—for someone with a severe case to die. You can see the disconnect in September and December.
Here is a plot of the seven-day average of new cases versus new COVID-19 inpatient beds. Note that there is a zero line for new beds shown in red. Above that line, beds are being added, below it they are being freed up:
For the month of December, pressure was being taken off the hospital system. Now everything has changed and new beds are slightly exceeding the highest rate during the peak of the Delta wave.
Glimmer of Hope
The glimmer of hope here is that this Omicron wave may peak and burn out quickly. That's
what happened in South Africa. I've heard it compared to a forest fire that burns intensely before consuming all its fuel and dying out.
Now experts are saying the same is likely to happen here. A pandemic modeler at Columbia University
said this week: "Our projections depict a rapid surge of cases nationally that peaks at record high numbers during the first one to three weeks of January."
Even more hopeful, some experts are also
predicting that the Omicron wave could end the most serious aspects of the pandemic. One
called a highly contagious but less pathogenic variant a "best case scenario."
In the best case, Omicron would extinguish the Delta variant, which produces more serious disease. The ASU Dashboard reports that over 95% of their samples carry the s-gene dropout, which signals the Omicron variant, so this could be happening.
Let's hope all these predictions come to pass. If they do we may only have another couple of weeks to ride this out until the disease
becomes endemic, more like the cold or flu.
