Happy Thanksgiving!

Even in a year like this one, we have much to be thankful for. Most of us, even if we get sick, will fully recover. Treatments continue to improve. Given expectations, this week’s numbers were surprisingly good, to the extent that I have theories later to explain why. The market is at all time highs. The center held. We are at peace. Vaccines are on their way soon and look to be super effective. Life goes on. Life finds a way. A year from now, we likely will be able to give thanks for no longer living in quite such interesting times.

As bad as many things have been, they could have been far worse.

Short term, even though positive test rates on average declined for now, things remain rather grim. The holiday is about to hit us, followed a month later by Christmas. Positive percentages are down, which is great, but there are reasons to suspect that is somewhat of a mirage this week. Raw positive test counts are still up, and deaths are doing exactly what one would expect from a lagging indicator, giving us the most since early May.

Still, it is good to give thanks. Gratitude is hugely underutilized. I will conclude this post by giving thanks.

First, let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Last week’s prediction was a 13.4% positive rate on 9.5 million tests, versus 12.3% positive rate on 8.9 million tests last week with 1,209 deaths per day. Instead, we got pleasantly surprised, and got an 11.6% positive rate on 10.4 million tests, but 1,644 deaths per day. I did not predict deaths.

Median prediction for this next week is weird, but I’ll say with wider than usual error bars 12.8% positive rate on 11 million tests, and a rolling average of 2,100 deaths.

Deaths

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST
Sep 24-Sep 30	934	990	2619	360
Oct 1-Oct 7	797	1103	2308	400
Oct 8-Oct 14	782	1217	2366	436
Oct 15-Oct 21	804	1591	2370	523
Oct 22-Oct 28	895	1701	2208	612
Oct 29-Nov 4	956	1977	2309	613
Nov 5-Nov 11	1089	2712	2535	870
Nov 12-Nov 18	1255	2934	2818	1127
Nov 19-Nov 25	1761	4169	3396	1714

This is slightly worse than I expected, especially in the West and Northeast. If you look at the 14-day and 21-day lagged CFR, week over week, we do see small increases, but that is to be expected as well, as positive test percentages are rising and thus we are missing a larger percentage of cases, and also as some hospitals are under increased strain. The best we can reasonably hope ...