Thought of the Day - November 14 2021 - By the Numbers

The world's daily official cases and deaths continue to increase, by 8% and 3% respectively over the past week. Here is a new graph showing what areas in the world are experiencing record cases (in red).

As you can see the majority are in Europe. Cases throughout Europe continue to sky-rocket, the continent is now reporting six times the cases per capita than the world average.

And five times as many daily deaths per capita.

And at present Europe has not reached the peak of its current wave.

While a few countries are subsiding like Romania, Estonia and Latvia, others are rapidly taking their place, Hungary, Germany and Austria for example. Many European countries, shown in red, are experiencing their highest case levels ever.

So what does this mean for us? Well, not unexpectedly we know we will see something similar in the not too distant future.

It looks like the downward trend in the US has come to an end.

New cases across the US are up 8% over the past week. They are now running at about 33% of their peak. Thus if previous trends are followed, this means here in Canada we may see our next wave starting a little earlier than predicted, possibly as early as mid-December.

Here in Canada over the past two weeks, we have dropped down another 5% in cases. However, over the past seven days, much of the previous week's significant gains were eroded as cases are climbing again in almost all provinces, signalling the end to our fourth-wave declines. We are now running at about 30% of our peak level of cases.

The Yukon continues as our epicentre, with almost an order of magnitude more cases per capita than the country average. In deaths, the Northwest Territories and Saskatchewan still dominate, due to their high case rates last month.

Earlier this week I had a look at the figures in BC; comparing current figures to those of a year ago at this time. Overall, as mentioned in the last week's "By the Numbers", for the first time in a long time we are about back down to where we were this time last year in new cases. New cases in BC back then (on Nov 10 2020) were 525 and now (on Nov 10 2021) are 555. More importantly, active cases are now significantly below where we were a year ago: last year 5,133 now 4,321.

That said, the number of people in hospital, in intensive care, and dying, are still way higher than last year. Three times as high:

• Hospital 142 (then) and 426 (now)

• ICU 45 and 124

• Deaths 3 and 11

• Care homes 33 and 29 (we finally have fewer outbreaks than a year ago at this time)

One of the main differences from a year ago is that last year we were going into a wave while this year we are coming out of one. Therefore the fatal effects of last year's second wave had not yet been fully felt, and yet this year we are still seeing the aftermath of last month's fourth wave. Therefore it is not surprising to see numbers say twice as big at this time. That said, I am not sure this is the whole story.

The second reason, despite press commentary to the contrary, does appear that for those that get sick, Delta ends up being more deadly, despite the efforts of vaccines. We touched on this a month ago when we compared fatality rates in our third wave in spring with this fourth wave in the fall ( Thought of the Day - October 10 2021 - By the Numbers ).

This week's shout-out goes to Alberta. They are now back down to the same daily new case levels as BC and Quebec.

Unfortunately, as seems to be the theme today, while Alberta's fatality rate in this last wave was similar to their wave a year ago, it was much higher, by a factor of three, than their wave this spring. Meaning, from a numbers perspective, any gains made in the treatment or management of COVID in the province have been more than given back.

Cheers

Cliff