Both national and local news have been reporting that Covid cases have been “dramatically” increasing since July. Apparently there’s yet another new variant that evades the waning immunity provided by prior infection or vaccination.
Great.
That’s why I decided to get the most recent recent Covid vaccine as well as my annual Flu shot this week. I figure, any protection I get from either is better than none. Even if the “dramatic” increase is hype, I know that flu and viruses spread a lot throughout the fall and winter. The combination of snot monsters spreading germs in school, families and friends celebrating the holidays together in crowded indoor places, and football and travel all provide a multitude of opportunities to spread airborne viruses.
I checked the NC DHHS website to see the numbers behind the “dramatic increase”. The state no longer tracks cases because testing and reporting is now so scattershot there is no way to accurately assess the number of cases. Instead, the state monitors the level of Covid found in wastewater to track the overall trend and weekly hospital admissions for Covid, Flu and RSV (aka, the completely made-up-by-newcasters “Tripledemic”)
Here’s a screenshot of last week’s Hospitalization graph.
That looks pretty ominous, doesn’t it? Hospital admissions are rising weekly and appear to be at 3X what they were in June.
When I looked closer at the data, there was more to the story.
- The green, which you can barely see, represents Flu hospital admissions. We had a total of 11 last week.
- RSV isn’t even represented because there have been so few ER visits for RSV and even fewer admissions.
- The current peak for Covid admissions is 613 for the entire state of NC.
So I ran some quick calculations.
NC Total Population – 10 Million
NC Covid Admissions – 613
% of NC population admitted to hospital for Covid during our peak week – .006%
Not 6%. Not .6%. Not .06%.
.006%.
Literally 613 people out of 10 million.
That’s 61 out of a million.
Or 6 people out of 100 thousand.
I imagine getting Covid sucks. I hope I never get it and hope you never do either. Being sick sucks.
Having a severe case of Covid sounds awful. Having it bad enough to require hospitalization, I’m sure is scary and painful. My heart goes out to those 613 people.
But based on these numbers, I’m not worried about the over-hyped Tripledemic.