by Calculated Risk on 11/17/2020 07:57:00 PM

The end of the pandemic is coming, possibly by Q2 2021! 

Please be careful, especially over the holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years will be tough this year, but keep your guard up - plan now to have a safe holiday.

The US is now averaging over 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 1,243,225 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 155,201 positive tests.  

Almost 17,500 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 12.5% (red line is 7 day average).  The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by the sum of negative and positive results (I don't include pending).

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. 

• 7-day average cases are at a new record.

• 7-day average deaths at highest since May.

• Record Hospitalizations.