COVID-19 A Second Wave? [Part 1 of 2]

You. It's great to be with everybody once again. I haven't done a video in quite some time because I just haven't felt the need to do a full blown video. Been doing lots of podcasts and social media, putting information out there. New things I've been learning on Facebook as well as Instagram. But in the last week or two, there's been a lot of information about numbers and data and how numbers are spiking. And I've been following this the whole time since January, and I was a little confused as far as these spikes. So I've been looking at this a little deeper and I want to kind of go back to an old topic we talked about a couple of months ago, about looking at data, interpreting for yourselves and getting good quality data. And so we'll look at. I want to do a two part series. Part one is going to be looking at the CDC website, which is what we're looking at here. And part two is going to be looking at Worldometer. Now first, a few tidbits about this. The CDC website repeats things longitudinally and usually there's a delay about a week or two. If you look at this one right here, it's week 26, which is ending June 27th. Okay. Which was about a week ago. So one thing you have to realize is that the CDC is going to lag by about a week. Now, when you look at numbers, you have to realize you don't make. In my personal investments, I don't make investments based on how the Stark market does today. If it goes up 5 percentage points, that does not change my strategy. If it goes down 5 percentage points, that does not change my strategy. Whatever strategy you're using to interpret data to invest your money, you have a long view. You always have to have a long view. And so one week lag from the CDC is not going to impact our long view. What I think is happening is we're looking at microcosms of data and extrapolating them out to the entire country or the entire world, which you just cannot do. I cannot take data from Arizona, for example, or Florida, and extrapolate it out to Virginia or, or New Hampshire or Maine. So what I want to do is just kind of realize, walk through this, do part one, which will be looking at the CDC website, which is more the big view. And then part two will be looking at Worldometry, which I'm going to break down different states and kind of track us through what's been going on. Big picture is we're major on the miners big picture is everything that's going on now, we expected, we talked about about six weeks ago when we reintroduced ourselves to society, we'd see an uptick in the numbers. And that's we're going to talk about what's going on right now is actually not unexpected. We expected this. And there is a certain degree of conflation. So today we'll be talking about the CDC website. And then next time on part two, the wordometer. So this again, the dates are week 26. Now, the way these things are dated for the CDC is week one is the first week of the year 2020. Week 26 is the 26th week of 2020, ending June 27th. What you need to realize, they have, you know, in the middle section right here, they have public health laboratory data. You have clinical laboratory data and commercial labs. We have to realize the public health lab is more like public health centers. It's gonna be a little different than clinical labs. In my Clinic, I use LabCorp Quest, and that's gonna be a commercial laboratory. What you're seeing is you are seeing an increase from 8.7% to 9.3% as far as the number of positive tests versus public health, 5.6 to 6.3. So this is a recurring theme we'll see throughout, that we're seeing between 8 and 10% of specimens across the country are testing positive right now. So what that means is we're testing a lot of people. More people are being tested that are negative than are positive. But we're seeing about 10% rate per week, which is relatively slow progression throughout the population. Some of these things in the mortality data, one thing that's interesting is that looking at the CDC website, they say the mortality decreased from 9% to 5.9%. So they have been recording a overall lowering of the mortality from the beginning till now. One thing that's interesting, if you were intubated with this disease back in March, you had 80% chance of dying from it if you're intubated, meaning a tube is put down your throat to breathe. From COVID 19 tubing two weeks ago, your mortality rate was 40% as of a published article on dexamethasone. Now the mortality if you're intubated is now 30%. So that's a huge, huge change. A huge switch from 80% chance of dying if you're intubated to 30%. So now if you intubated, you're more likely to live than not. That's a huge thing that no one's really talking about right now. But the point of that, with this mortality is that they're only taking mortality on people that they've tested, not the tenfold times more people that are not being tested that have the disease. And based on that, currently the mortality rate in the United states is about 0.5%. I saw a few things this past week suggesting it might be 0.3 to 0.4. Of note, I will be doing another video on a tool that you can actually calculate your own personal risk for dying of this disease. And I think that's actually a big. A big win. So this is just looking at different regions with key points that you all can go back and look at this. The CDC website again, looking at the specimens being tested the Most, you know, 1.8 million specimens from June 21 to June 26. So we've definitely ramped up our testing. Public health 225,000 commercial labs, 1.5 million. So most of the tests are being done in commercial labs. And commercial labs, which is where I live, that's where I practice is in the regular world, your regular doctor out in the community. Almost 10% of these are testing positive. So that's a pretty fair number. And I want to sit on this graphic right here just a little bit and explain it. So we're looking at is we go up here a little bit. It's talking about the number of test specimens we have, number of people tested and the number of positives. So if we look at this thin line, we look at the percentage of positives. This green is actually the people over 65 initially back again week 14, which would put us back late March. Large percentage, you know, of people tested positive were over 65. Now look, it's kind of come down. We do see is this gray line now which represents the people that are 5 to 17. That's kind of crept up a little bit, but if you look, it hasn't skyrocketed, but it now represents the highest percentage of people that are testing positive. So we've seen a shift from older people being the most common to get this to younger people. And that's what you're hearing the media. The thing about the younger people being hospitalized is they're more likely to live than not. So we're seeing a shift from the older people getting this to younger people getting this. Younger people are more agile, the more out there, the more doing things. And so they're spreading it quicker. And that's what we're seeing. But they're less likely to Die from this. That's a huge thing to keep in mind. If you look at the actual specimens tested on what you'll see this, the yellow, this yellow orange color right here. That represents those from 18 to 49 years of age. You'll look to see more people in my age range. I'm 47, testing, being tested for this disease. If you look at the green, which is Those again, over 65, that thickness is about the same since week 19 to 20. So there's no real difference in the number of older people being tested. We're seeing a lot more younger people being tested. And that's part of the shift as well. Younger people are being tested. Younger people are more likely to spread it without symptoms to get better. So, okay, we're not seeing anything unexpected. Okay, this is another data. This is all from the CDC website. This is here for anybody look at this anytime and interpret it for themselves. And that's one of my recommendations as people interpret the data for themselves. So this is looking at the number of specimens tested in the percentage of positives. And we see a big spike, lots of testing being done. The percentage positive is a little lower. And this is. And it's looking between 5. They're saying between 5 and 6% here. Again, when you put it all together across the country ends up being slightly south of 10%. Looking commercial labs. Again, this is where most of us live. Most people watching this on the Internet are going to see a doctor in a standard clinic. Again, you'll see the yellow area being those between 1848 more than being tested. You'll see the green. The specimen tested over 65. The older people now represents the least number of people tested when it used to one point be the most. So I don't know if you can see that, how it goes from the top to the bottom. And then the number on the top now is the younger people. So we're seeing a shift in the demographic of people getting this. It's going from the very old to the younger people. That's we need to get herd immunity. We need younger people that are more likely to survive to get this. Okay. And not to die from it. This is a percentage of visits for influenza like illness. The point is about weakness 15. We see a big drop off and we see that maintained the dotted line is the expected baseline. So again, everything is under the baseline, even all the way up to week 26. Okay. Which was a week ago from the recording of this dated June 27th. From today is July 3rd. So hopefully you'll Watch this before it gets too dated, but in regards to when you look at this, this just allows you to interpret the data for yourself. Right. Right now the influenza season is looking pretty, pretty minimal. Okay, emergency departments. This is influenza, like illness going to emergency departments as a percentage of visits. We overall see that those numbers, they did peak week 12 again back in March. They've come down and have not kept back up. Hospitalizations, again, trends have not changed all that much. With hospitalizations, the people that are more likely to be hospitalized are the elderly. Again, I've been hearing some different news on the news. I did do a little Facebook post on some of the quality of the data that should be posted this week or put into the queue. I recommend you looking at that because it talks about how data being the quality of the data that you're looking at is important. It doesn't matter what the data says. The articles say, the news say. If the data is wrong, it's wrong. And right now only about 4 to 5% of what's being put out there through social media is coming from physicians like myself. About 13 to 15% is coming from medical organizations. The vast majority is coming from laypersons, coming from organizations that aren't medical. And so that might be part of the concern with numbers being a little bit misrepresented. Again, looking at the CDC website, we see that the vast majority of people being hospitalized are those over 65. Yes. There is an uptick. And there's 50 to 64. There is an uptick of those. The purple. I'm sorry, five. Sorry, five to 17. Okay. The younger the 50. 64. I can't really see these colors. You do see uptrend, but the majority of people being hospitalized are still the elderly. And that's where we need to keep that in mind. Okay, again, you can look at this yourself. Age adjusted hospitalizations. I did do a little article as well about some of the ethnic disparities with COVID 19. This just is a graphic representation of the the rate per 100,000 of non Hispanic Native Americans which are getting hit the hardest versus non Hispanic blacks versus Hispanics versus Asian Islanders versus non Hispanic whites. And you'll see there's definitely a huge disparity. Please look at that post. It does talk about explanation for some of these things and things you can actually do to mitigate it, which I think is huge. Just looking at this and saying I'm doomed if you're a non Hispanic American Indian, I don't think is appropriate because there actually are things that those Populations can do to at least mitigate to a degree the risk. Again, some more numbers data. There was one more graphic I wanted to look at. This is the last graphic I want to talk on this thing. This is a graphic just looking at from 2018 to 2019 to 2020. And you can see the numbers 2018, 2019 and 2020. And this is looking at the black wavy line represents the typical waxing and waning of influenza mortality in any given season. And this is again representing three seasons. If you look back to season, you'll see this spike right here. Many people did not realize that there's about 84,000 deaths from flu in 2018. And this is one of the highest. This is actually the highest flu, non epidemic flu season death in modern times. No one really talked about it a whole lot. And then we have COVID 19. Yeah, huge peak coming up. And now it's back down. So that represents what we've just gone through. The thing about it is it's gone back down to the normal seasonal variation. Okay. Which is kind of the point of what we've been talking about. So I would just refer people back to the CDC website, which is what this is. If they want more information. I think need to get good data points, good information and not get excited about misinformation or misrepresentation of the information. The summary of this is that we are on the downside. There's been a shift from the older people getting this to the younger people getting this. There are more hospitalizations, but still more likely in the elderly. And the younger people who get hospitalized lives are more likely to survive. A couple things we'll talk about later are again the tool to predict your own risk for dying from this. Part two is going to be actually looking at the Worldometer and breaking down by states to describe this a little better. Hopefully this is helpful to wrap your brain around a little bit of the excitement about the labs and the testing and the stuff out there. And COVID 19 to get you a little better prepared. One of our goals is to continue to educate people, give them tools and things they can do to help mitigate the risk of this. Because they're. As more data comes out, we're learning more and more about what we can do to mitigate our risk for this. Literally something that was 80% fatal if you're intubated and that was 30% fatal. Never in the history of medicine have we seen something's fatality drop so precipitously in just six months. This is amazing. And I think we should be focusing on that and the fact that to date we only have two FDA approved drugs. One's Remdesivir, the other one is actually, well, is dexamethasone. Dexamethasone has actually shown the greatest data for changing mortality and it's actually cheap and readily available. So this is helpful. Please share with family and friends. Please like it. Follow Us we will continue to put information out on social media, Facebook as well, do these videos as I feel they're appropriate. But ultimately you need to be informed, educated, so you can make wise decisions for yourself, your family, your loved ones and kind of keep your head in the game and not let things get out of control, I guess. Take care. Have a great fourth of July weekend. I know that dates this video, but it is the 4th of July weekend and you all take care and be well.