To circle back to this, Sweden has 165,000 deaths on a US population corrected basis. Unfortunately, their model has been to resist any lockdowns, but then gradually relent bit by bit. So they've effectively done almost what everyone else did, only much slower. And their new daily cases continue to grow in contrast to most of Europe.
The WHO yesterday forecasted that within about 6-8 weeks, Brazil will pass the US in total COVID-19 deaths. That is an amazingly stunning prediction. Brazil has recently had some 40,000 new daily cases and have been hitting 1,500 deaths per day.
Brazil is a disaster beyond all disasters in this. And it is widely considered that their numbers are highly underreported as well.
I'm thrilled that our death count has come down to what it has, but we are definitely seeing the rising of cases now, will have to wait and see if hospitalizations start to go up in more areas, obviously AZ, AL and FL have some really bad spots (FL is down to 22% ICU availability as of today).
It's starting to impact a younger population than what happened in the NE, so i'm hoping that helps keeps hospitalizations down.
Cases starting rising 1 week ago on a national basis - that's about 2 and a half weeks after Memorial Day, right about when you would expect to see cases start to increase. Before that there wasn't much change in mobility reports in May so while stay at home orders had been lifted the number of people that were going out didn't increase all that much.
The lag time on some of this is really long. First it takes 3-4 weeks for the spread - it has to go through multiple generations (first person infected, people they infect, people they infect,etc) - before you see any increase. Then people have to get sick enough to be tested. Then they have to get sick enough to end up in the hospital - and then it all has to flow through the reporting stream - which all by itself can take 4-5 days going from the local hospital or test center, to the county, to the state, to the Federal.
Like you, it is good to see that hospitalizations haven't taken off to this point. Will they take off, who knows - they have in a few areas, will they start to spread or taper off.
The number of states i'm really concerned about are probably fewer than 10 right now.
The 2 that are flashing the worst are AL and AZ. Both have increasing cases, little bed availability left, and positive case rates in the mid-teens.
The other ones that are at least flashing yellow now are AR (cases increasing, testing decreasing, 7.3% case rate), FL (cases rapidly increasing - have tripled since the beginning of June, testing flat, case rate 7.4% and increasing), GA (cases increasing, testing decreasing, case rate 7.6%, highest increase in per capita death rate in the US right now), NC (increasing cases, testing increasing, 7.6% case rate) - i'm hoping NC is past the worst already, OK (rapidly increase cases, testing decreasing, case rate up to 5.1%), Texas (increasing cases, testing up - but less than cases are up, case rate 7.9%), Utah (cases rising, testing up, 8.6% case rate) - like NC may have already peaked.
What I see is a picture that isn't 'bad', but it isn't 'good' either. It's just sort of meh and could easily go either way. it is frustrating to see how well most other countries have done with knocking their cases down though campared to us. Compare a graph of US cases to any other Western Civilized country and it just sticks out like a sore thumb. You have a country like New Zealand that completely knocked it down (had 0 cases last week, currently has 3 cases all from people who came into the country and are being quarantined), they did away with all restrictions last week - had rugby matches with 40K people this weekend. Australia is very close to New Zealand. In Europe every country other than Sweden did a much better job of knocking down cases - that will give them more flexibility to open things up than we will - though I did see today that Germany has banned all large scale events through October.
As someone that works in Financial Services i'm somewhat worried about the long term economic effects. There is plenty of literature out there that shows that areas that knock down infectious diseases more completely have better economic outcomes than those that don't. You can already see it a little internationally. Sweden is sort of the black sheep of Europe right now with most EU countries not allowing Swedish residents into their countries. Their economy held on better for a short time but it didn't last and their numbers are now in line with Europe.
in North America, the US Government has been trying for 2 months to get Canada to relax the border restrictions and Canada has not budged, extending the cross-border travel restrictions another month out to July 21st, we'll see what happens then.
We have a number of potential shocks over the next few months that could hit us without more action. The PPP loans run out at the end of June. The layoff pay to Americans ends at the end of July. For some industries that took bailout money from the Feds they couldn't let anyone go until October 1st. So their is a potential for layoff events after the ends of June and Sept with a potential decrease in consumer spending due to loss of payments after the end of July. The US economy is being propped up to some extent by the $3T the government put into it, as well as the actions the Fed has taken in terms of liquidity and borrowing to help companies stay afloat.
