Covid-19 comes home.
It’s been a month of change.
We started the month not knowing anyone first hand who hand had Covid-19, now we have had family, friends and work colleagues come down with the disease. Thankfully all have come through it unscathed so far. It is really strange, many couples we know have had one person in the relationship get Covid-19 and the other not, even after spending isolation together.
In South Australia and broader Australia we have seen Covid-19 restrictions steadily withdrawn and life is getting back to near pre Covid-19 conditions. The strangest one for me is the dropping of mask mandates in most areas of life. I still can’t go into crowded areas without a mask on, and it seem about 20% of the population are the same.
My charts seem to indicate that April was a month of decline and stabilisation of the impact of Covid-19. The most worrying indicator is the death rate of those who get the disease, in Australia this has had a slight upward trend along with the numbers requiring ventilators.
April saw the world add another 14 million reported cases of Covid-19, just over 2.7% of the total number of cases reported since the start of the pandemic. Approximately 200,000 people lost their lives to Covid-19 worldwide. Australia added another 135 thousand cases, just over 2% of the total number of Covid-19 cases reported in Australia since the pandemic started, and another 1252 people lost their lives due to the disease.
My graphs can be seen via the link below.
Covid-19 charts January 2022 to end april 2022
Chart analysis
The number of people in hospital in Australia due to Covid-19 appears to be reaching a peak/plateau at around 3200 on any given recent day.
The number of people in hospital with Covid-19 on ventilators is fluctuating around 150 over recent days. Representing approximately 4.6% of people in hospital with Covid-19. NSW and Victoria appear to be having ICU number rising.
The trend in the daily number of people reported as dying of Covid-19 is up, this has been in this trend since mid-March. It has not yet reached the plateau shown in hospitalisation numbers. The rise appears to be being driven by NSW and Victoria.
The Australian Virus Reproduction Rate, on my calculations, appears to have found a band in which it fluctuates, 0.5 to 1.25., with a tendency for the ratio to be under 1 for most of the recent times.
The number of new daily recorded cases reached a 3-month peak at the end of March and has been steadily trending down since then, interestingly this has occurred independent of isolated surges in the number of tests carried out.
Daily Testing Numbers v Positive Test Numbers is showing that at least 50% of people getting PCR tested are showing up positive, this is relatively independent of the number of people tested.
Globally the world has seen a relatively steep decline in the number of new reported daily Covid-19 cases. Falling from a peak of 4,519,636 new cases on 20 January 2022 to consistent figures fluctuating around 750,000 +/- 10%. These numbers are approximately the same as the peaks of the pre-Delta / Omicron variants.
Australia is still a long way from reaching its pre-Delta / Omicron variant levels. While there is a moderate down trend in the graph, it is still around 25 times the former peak numbers of approximately 1700, with recent case numbers in the order of 45,000. We have a long way to go.
The percentage of people hospitalised and in ICU has been trending down since early February, and appears to be stabilising at a little over 4%.
To see my April 2022 blog follow the link below.
Number of Views :947#28 April 2022 Covid-19 is declining world-wide, but comes close to home
