Case Surveillance File: 61 Million Cases

The CDC just published its latest Case Surveillance File weighing in at 7.1 gigabytes. (For a quick review of this beastly file see here)

The latest numbers:

• 61,267,087 “confirmed” cases through the first week of February 2022

• 2,087,643 hospitalizations

• 785,458 deaths

This is the first report showing the massive surge of Omicron over the holiday into the new year. You can also see the diminished impact of the variant. the hospitalization rate of each group fell off the wall:

Here are cases, hospitalization rates, and CFR. Notice the very steep CFR drop off:

Curiously, the 0-19 age group saw its highest death toll of the pandemic in January 2022 but given the massive incidental infection rate among this group these numbers will have to be measured carefully. You can already see some of the anomaly when you compare logged deaths in this age groups with logged deaths + hospitalizations. In short, many counties are using wide parameters to log pediatric impact of COVID-19. Even in stringent San Francisco officials admitted that 70% of pediatric COVID hospitalizations were incidental. Still, we must admit that cases for this age group were through the roof. More on this later.

As we’ve noted in previous posts, if you compare metrics used to confirm an infection (a confirmed lab, a hospitalization and a relevant clinical date) you come to realize how woeful our data really is when rolled up to a national level.

From the chart above, the hospitalization status is on the left as rows and the sections related to the lab-status of case and the confirmed clinical date. To explain: a confirmed clinical date is 1) an onset of illness date (the patient indicated when they were first getting sick) and/or 2) the date that the specimen for the test was taken. If the person has neither of these then it is simple a reported date.

So, from the data in the file we can see that

• 277,780 deaths with a clinical date AND a confirmed case and a hospitalization

• Another 124,450 hospitalization deaths with a confirmed case and hospitalization but no clinical date.

Lots of info to follow.