It's Friday, and today's initial number of total cases for the state (170,584) shows the second highest daily increase at 4,588.
The record? Last Friday with 5,352.
That's good, right? You know, that we didn't set a new record?
Gosh I hope so.
But, there's also stuff to darken your mood.
As has been typical, we set another record for cases over the last 7 days (24,795). I remarked the other day that this is something we probably will have with us until the pandemic/wave really, really, eases up.
More disturbingly, the growth rate in total cases over the last 7 days is up to 17%. That is the highest since mid-July, when Utah was on the edge of the huge run-up in Arizona.
Further, this percent has been inching up this fall (again, something I've talked about before). It was down around 5% around Labor Day. Then it rose rapidly to 10% before stabilizing. That held until Halloween. But it's been inching up consistently ever since.
Keep in mind that a percentage change is a statistic that is often quite stable even when the levels data is "growing exponentially". So the right phrase for what is going on in Utah should be something like "growing faster than exponentially". There isn't a great word for that, but sometimes people use hyperbolically: so visualize how a time series would rise more quickly as it approached an asymptote (there's no asymptote for this data, but the visualization still works).
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On a different note, I haven't been keeping tight track of the data, but the tweets from the Southwest Utah Rural Health Department indicate that active cases in Iron County have tripled since Halloween.
Snark: well, at least we can be glad that while the outbreak has gotten worse as it's gotten colder, at least it won't be getting any colder than this. Geez.
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