The ongoing pandemic goes on and with no end in sight.
It feels like living in a horror movie where a sizable chunk of the population isn’t aware, or doesn’t care, that the zombies are knocking on the door.
The current numbers and the forecast projections are hard to wrap your head around.
Take this from the Centers for Disease Control and the report they issued today, Wednesday:
“This week’s national ensemble predicts that the number of newly reported COVID-19 deaths will likely increase over the next 4 weeks, with 9,800 to 35,700 new deaths likely reported in the week ending Feb. 12.”
Just in time for Valentine’s Day!
That’s actually optimistic from the CDC, the top-end forecast for weekly deaths, not the four-week total but weekly deaths is also roughly 35,000. That is clearly worst of the worse-case scenarios but is illustrated below:
The modeling and forecasting for Arkansas is bad. Really, really bad. As in break the chart, as the top-end models exceed the graphic, as seen below.
Weekly top-end numbers over 700 dead and four-week totals, well north of 12,000 and approaching the total number of Arkansans killed in war.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas called the Civil War, “one of the greatest disasters in Arkansas history. More than 10,000 Arkansans — black and white, Union and Confederate — lost their lives.”
The state could be there next week.
In World War II, 3,814 Arkansans died with 409 dead in Korea and 397 killed in Vietnam. There’s memorials here and there to those 4,620 dead.
As of Tuesday afternoon, 9,452 Arkansas have died. The state has 1,487 currently hospitalized and of those people, 171 are on ventilators.
And while the total active cases have dropped to 88,938, there’s been a little more than 120,000 additional people in Arkansas who have gotten sick from Covid as the total cases now stands 687,989 as of Tuesday. On Jan. 2, that number was 567,824.
Excellent article on a sad topic…even Dolly Parton said “ I don’t think it would hurt most people to wear a mask”…..