Has the winter Covid wave peaked in Indiana? I think so. Read more about it in the latest Covid update on The Region Economist here: https://regioneconomist.substack.com/p/indiana-covid-update-172023?sd=pf
24,413 Hoosiers have died from Covid-19.
On average, 24 people PER DAY EVERY DAY in Indiana have died from Covid since the first death was officially recorded 1024 days ago on 3/16/2020.
One out of every 277 residents in Indiana have died of Covid.
One out of every 42 residents aged 70+ in Indiana have died of Covid.
These are just confirmed deaths and don't include probable deaths, or those suffering long term health effects.
@pollak The CDC says, in 2017, 39 Hoosiers died per day of heart disease and 36 from cancer. The next highest totals were chronic lower respiratory disease (12) and accidents (11).
@kennysmith There was a period of time (Delta maybe?) that Covid was the leading cause of death in Indiana. I'd have to check the data, but I believe it was the second leading cause of death for most of 2020 and 2021. I do think there's a lot of substitution in mortality going on though and it might be something you would want to look at more in terms of excess mortality rather than mortality rate.
Thanks for sharing your state's data. I think people get numb to the national data sometimes and assume it doesn't matter to them. Reports like this are important.
In my opinion, like you said, excess mortality is the better way to look at it, and that generally seems to be running about equal to the COVID numbers in most places, so the overall excess death during the pandemic is double the "COVID" number for most places that I've looked at. A lot of this is regional, though. In Florida, for instance, district/county ME's have a lot of sway on cause of death and many are COVID deniers. Excess mortality and hospital admissions are far more important in that case.
I don't know the Indiana excess mortality data, maybe you can find that in the data set you're referencing, but from January - November of 2022 across the US it was ~714 people dying per day according to Our World in Data.
To your overall point, I thoroughly enjoyed your post on substack. Thank you for referencing the biobot.io data as having variant info. Quickly looking at it, my first guess would be that Indiana is between decreasing BA.5/BQ.1 and increasing XBB 1.5 and it'll actually go up across January, but, as you alluded to in your article, the lack of case data makes this all so much harder than it needs to be.
This seems to indicate that XBB is only just beginning in your region:
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/xbb-1-5-prevalence-by-region.html
I think we need to stop referencing seasons and start referencing variants. I'm not sure "winter" matters so much, particularly in a case like this when the data appears to show XBB hasn't really hit yet.
@BE HHS Region 5 (the region which includes Indiana) is at only about 7.3% prevalence for XBB 1.5, so definitely room to grow (source: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions).
That being said, I don't think prevalence (by itself) is a particularly useful metric. That is, if over a period of time we go from 0% to 100% of infections being XXB 1.5, but total infections fall 25%, then that's an improvement. /1
@BE What I mean is that *by definition* there will *always* be a new variant rising on its way to becoming dominant. But this may or may not be related in any way to either the number of people being infected (could be falling or rising) or the severity of their illness (could be getting less or more severe). /2
Completely agree! I think if you were, say, transitioning from BA.5 to BQ.1 you might not necessarily see another wave, per se.
I should have made my point more specific to this variant. I suspect everyone in the US will see a wave due to XBB 1.5. So, therefore, I'm guessing everywhere that has a low prevalence of it currently is about to see a wave. The data I've seen on it thus far seems to indicate, to me(not an epidemiologist) that prior infections of the variants we've mostly had in the US and vaccinations are going to do a poor job in containing this one. Thus my guess for Indiana.
I absolutely hope I'm wrong!
