Sunday was a SEVEN Green Arrow Day.

New Case Rate Plummets

Good Morning,

Sunday was a SEVEN Green Arrow Day; below are the particulars.

For the week ending February 7. 2021, the new cases of the virus have plummeted by 54% since about a month ago, the week ending January 10, 2021. There were 1.74 million cases then compared to 0.80 million patients for the later date.

The chart below shows new cases just before Thanksgiving through the end of last week.

There are several ways to look at the cases and draw conclusions. One view could refer to the “holiday” effect of too much social gathering for the spike; that probably would make sense on the surface. But there might be a more insightful reason. There has been a direct correlation between testing volume and new cases.

Remember, in the early days, few had access to a test due to the availability of test kits, distribution capability, and the test’s reliability. As testing challenges waned, testing, of course, increased and thus positive cases. Our country advanced to the point that not only anyone that wanted a test could get one, but many were tested repeatedly. Each time a person had a test administered, the results were recorded as either positive or negative. For example, if a healthcare worker or professional athlete was tested positive and had second, third, fourth, or more tests, each result was tallied as a new case.

The truth is nobody knows how many “real” cases (excluding duplicate tests) there are.

It is plausible that COVID 19 infection rate never really changed, but our testing capability and limited reporting parameters are the only things that did. After all, the CDC’s reported that there might have been ten times more cases in the early days than reported.

By the way, last week, the US vaccinated another ten million people bringing the accumulative total to 41.2 million, up from 31.1 million for the week ending January 31, 2021
potent virus.

New Cases

The chart shows new cases beginning for the week ending November 15, 2020, through February 7, 2021.

Note the highest level was reached in the week ended January 10, 2021