by Calculated Risk on 11/09/2020 07:05:00 PM

Great news today on on the likely Pfizer vaccine. This probably means most Americans will be vaccinated by Q2 2021, but we all need to be careful throughout the Winter!

The US is now averaging close to 1 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be well under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US still needs to increase the number of tests per day significantly (or take actions to push down the number of new infections).

There were 1,304,873 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 118,497 positive tests. This is a Monday reporting record.

Almost 8,000 US deaths have been reported so far in November. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here.

Click on graph for larger image.

This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.

The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 9.1% (red line is 7 day average).

For the status of contact tracing by state, check out testandtrace.com.

And check out COVID Exit Strategy to see how each state is doing.

The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations.

The dashed line is the previous hospitalization maximum.

Note that there were very few tests available in March and April, and many cases were missed, so the hospitalizations was higher relative to the 7-day average of positive tests in July. 

Now, there are many more tests, and many cases are being detected earlier - so hospitalizations have lagged. However, it is likely that hospitalizations will be at a new high tomorrow.

This is a new record 7-day average cases for the USA.