Why are active covid cases in the US so high?

That is a little odd. At first I thought maybe India had a surge over a month ago and came back down, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. America is surging in many parts of the US now, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are a lot of active cases. America likely keeps people alive longer than most other countries, although, I’ve heard that they are letting patients die sooner now.

It is not obvious to me that it isn’t true. The contagion rate in the US has been climbing at a terrifying rate recently.

I am seeing 280.514 new cases reported on December 11 (not known the day before). That’s over a million new cases per four days, heading for a million new cases per three days. It’s over ten times the rate during the spring, and the trend is not slowing down.

The answer to this is as plain as the fact that YOU are a propagandist, and know full well that those figures reflect the KNOWN cases in India. As for why the United States leads the pack in deaths and infections, again you know the answer: you and your cohorts’ elevation of a certifiable buffoon to the Presidency. The dummy would have an additional 4 years to fk up had he not so disastrously blown this one!

I’m just thinking, wait until January 7th in America, the numbers are going to be outrageous.

Yes testing is readily available, even here. More importantly, quarantine fatigue.

You said it. Its a reporting problem.

The US has too many people who must think COVID-19 only affects the other guy, so they keep going about their lives as (was) normal.

Looks like France is in the same situation. Guess our countries aren’t great at reporting “closed” cases.

For active cases I will blame the states private health care system, and you would think any level of Government wants to report recovered cases.
Should also add because of Private health care a great many people are trying to recover at home while they should have been in hospital.

@SQUEEKY2 Your thought about recovering at home is only interesting because we are running out of hospital beds and staff in my area at several medical centers.

: – (

Imagine how many cases would be reduced if our fearless leader asked his supporters to chip in and do their part to stope the spread. Do it for the other guy! Sadly, that is not in his nature.
Instead he is being manipulated by conspiracy theorists who profit from dissent, overloading our health care system, and further dividing the country.
Trump is Putin’s Patsy.

How different it would be if he just said: “People! We need to get together on this! Covid is not a political issue . It is a health issue. Let’s all chip in and beat it together.”

It’s not about Trump or the other guy. It’s the conditions and the number tally. Testing and record keeping are just better in the developed world. If you have a headache or a sniffle you can get tested. Most of our population is in urban centers where it spreads easily. People travel in and out of this country more frequently. There is far more mobility within the borders as well. It certainly does not help that it’s winter here in the states either. You can blame Trump if you want but he could not take credit for this if he wanted to. Numbers are going to continue to climb with Biden in office no matter what he says or does. Only an effective, widely distributed vaccine will stop this before it tears through the entire population. We can lock down again but as soon as the lockdown ends it will come roaring right back unless we all get vaccinated. Simply wearing a mask is not going to do shit. Any positive effect is erased when people go back to the way they lived before only “with a mask” everyone wears one that I see here yet the numbers still climb.

@SQUEEKY2 I think anyone who needs to be hospitalized is either in the hospital or dead. If you need to be there then it’s not something you can recover from on your own. My friend who was borderline go to the hospital, her doctor did his best to keep her out of the hospital.

My point @JLeslie is people suffering at home because they lack the insurance to be in the hospital.

My family and I tested positive on 30 Nov. Our county health dept called us twice to check up on us. Since our symptoms have disappeared (~8 Dec) the health dept has not followed up to close our case.

@JLeslie My simple math equation is:

# Active Cases = Total cases – Recoveries – Deaths

Filling in the numbers I have already provided, plus the number of deaths we get:

6.6 million = 16 million – # Recoveries – 0.3 million

Solving for recoveries, we get 9.1 million.

Therefore, less than 60% of all cases have recovered. By contrast, Percentage recovered in India is about 95%!

You can try to rationalize all you want; it does seem that the US and some other countries list patients as “active” long after they are considered recovered in other countries.

@Zaku New cases in the US = 1 million per week, which is about 6% of total cases to date.

New cases in Brazil = .2 million per week, which is about 3% of total cases to date.

Active cases in the US = 6.6 million, which is about 40% of total cases, while active cases in Brazil are about 11% of total cases.

Since the US is seeing double the infection rate of Brazil, let us arbitrarily double Brazil’s percentage. That would put the US active cases at about 20% of total cases, not 40%.

@KNOWITALL More testing equals more cases. That is true. However, most cases do recover.

Just for the sake of illustration, let us look at the numbers for the last two weeks.

Number of new cases = about 3 million.

If none of these are recovered by today, that would give us 3 million active cases. That would leave 3.6 million unrecovered cases from over two weeks ago. Seems strange.

@gondwanalon There is no other reasonable explanation.

@Demosthenes Correct. France shows an active/total ratio off over 90%. Whatever is wrong with US reporting is magnified in French reporting.

@LuckyGuy How you can squeeze your idiotic ideas about Trump into this thread is beyond me. Perhaps somebody else can chime in.

@AYKM My question has nothing to do with the number and trajectory of new cases.

@jdt2003 I think that is exactly what is going on. If you are not sick, you don’t count.

Let me accommodate you. I’ll give you some “chimes” you obdurate ninny. All you need do to eliminate speculation over reporting differences is stare at the one indisputable and glaring statistic that SHOULD shut you up—the per capita death toll HERE. And of course Trump is 100% responsible for both the severity and extent of this disease in probably the most catastrophic failure of leadership in the history of this country. This is HIS pandemic. He owns it and history will remember him for it.

@crazyguy Comparing the US stats to Brazil stats…

Ok, look at the new case curves of USA and Brazil next to each other .

Let me know if this makes the situation clear to you, and answers your question, or not. (It does to me.)

Also, notice how quickly the US curve is rising. Your 1 million per week figure has risen to over 1.4 million per week, and climbing…

@crazyguy And I answered your question if you bothered to read the response.

@Zaku The link you provided illustrates the obvious. The US new case counts are substantially higher, even on a per capita basis. However, that is not the question.

The question is why do we show that about 40% of all cases are still considered active in the US. That number sticks out like a sore thumb compared to most of the other nations of the world.

@AYKM I just reread your answer. Your answer explains why the US new case count is high, and trading higher. However, it does not answer my question.

Define “active” because it’s tricky. It includes people snared up in “contact tracing” who are being watched. It’s also people tested with symptoms and also those just awaiting test results who may not even have symptoms. It’s not just current positives or people with antibodies. Many “actives” actually don’t have it. It’s “confirmed cases” that do.

@AYKM I leave definitions to experts, like the folks on worldometers.

The active US cases are so high, because they been tokin’ some celestially fine ganga, Mon! ;-P

@crazyguy Because that’s how the numbers add up. Look at the area under the curve. The area under the curve on the right will be recent cases who are still active. Compare to the much lower and flatter past cases. Depending on how long it is taking cases to be considered inactive (a month or more could make sense, depending on the criteria), because our graph has made a sharp left turn up the numbers, there could easily be 40% of the area of that graph still active, it seems to me.

The reason it’s so different compared to other counties, is because other countries’ graphs are different shapes. Most of them have not taken a severe recent left turn the way the US has. Evidently, people in most other countries have managed to get their numbers down and have not suffered a recent surge in infections.

And, some others have been having recent surges. France, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria… all have high active fractions too, because they had recent surges. Though the USA is still experiencing terrifyingly high rising numbers, while those countries got their curves turned back down.

@Zaku Do not compound your initial confusion. Number of current cases has something to do with currently active cases; just not as much as you are describing. It is a rather simple explanation. Just what do we consider “recovered” vs other countries?

Hey crazydude why not ask a DOCTOR what he/she considers recovered?
You would think it’s in the governments best interest to keep the cases of recovered totally currant, it doesn’t look good to anyone to have so many active cases.
We do have a doctor here on Fluther ,why not pm him and ask?

@crazyguy I don’t think I am the one who is confused here.

You are the one who asked, “Obviously, this cannot be true; so what gives?” As with most math problems, when something seems impossible and must be wrong, you should first check your own understanding of the detail of what the data actually says.

Maybe this will help: Maybe you don’t understand that hat curve is not a curve of the total number of cases over time. Neither is it a curve of the active cases over time. It is a curve of the new cases.

The recovery period is something like a month. Referring to this cumulative version of the same data , on December 12, the US cumulative total cases was 16.06 million. A month before that, on November 11, the US cumulative total cases was 10.57 million. So, if we take a rough estimate that it takes about a month for a case to go from newly reported to reported as no longer active, the percentage would be (16.06 – 10.57) / 16.06×100% = 34.2%. So assuming I was a little optimistic about all cases becoming inactive after one month, that’s about on track for 40% of all US cases being active at the moment.

@Zaku So, by your analysis, all other countries are way off?

10 percent of the cases in the US were the 7 days before December 11th, same for the two weeks before that !

I’ll run down. 25 % of the case in the US happened in the the last 21 days ! I t takes three to five weeks to recover.

The freaking pandemic is out of control in the US and will continue, because wearing a mask is “against my rights” and they just spread COVID-19 from Thanksgiving and Christmas will be worse.

@crazyguy What do you mean way off? I think they have had different situations and different data histories, and therefore different statistics, as shown in the data. The only data I noticed that looked like a the data itself being off is a very recent severe spike in Asian numbers (probably a large amount of data just came in there), but I think that’s not what you’re talking about.

@Zaku Thank you for indulging me.

I am still confused. Part of my confusion stems from cumulative percent recovered. Here are the numbers for different countries:

1. USA: Just under 10 million recovered out of over 17 million total cases gives about 59%.
2. Indis: 9.46/9.93 = Over 95%.
3. Brazil: About 87%.
4. Russia: Over 79%.
5. France: Under 8%!

Another way to illustrate my confusion is the ratio of active cases/daily new cases. For these stats I am using rough averages of new cases.

US: 6.7 million/ 200,000 per day = 34!
India: 333,000/27,000 per day = 12.
Brazil: 29
Russia: 19
France: 214!
Italy: 45
Turkey: 7!
Germany: <20

What the data seems to be showing is that our standard of care is not as high as in the rest of the world (with the glaring exception of France). I would expect us to have a higher rate of recovery than India, Turkey, Brazil and Russia.

Uh maybe your wonderful private health care system isn’t as great as you Rep/cons make it out to be.

@crazyguy The dominant factor affecting active cases compared to total cases, is simply how many cases are recent (within the last month or two) compared to how many cases there were in the past. And that the history of infection over time is different in different countries. That explains almost all of what you are remarking at.

That is, in the USA, we are in the middle of a massive surge of infection that is still increasing more and more. It is dwarfing the number of infections in the first and second waves of infection we had. That is not what is happening in most other counties.

(Actually, it is a little bit similar to what happened recently in Europe, except their massive surge happened before ours, was not as huge as ours is, and is now dropping off.)

Basically, the numbers you are confused by mostly make sense to me mathematically. We have had a huge recent surge that is still in progress and dwarfs the size of our past history of infection, and 40% looks about right looking at the graph.

France looks to me like they are taking about two months to declare a case inactive, and looking at their graph, they recently had a massive infection wave which is still mostly in that two month period, AND they did not have very many infections in their first wave, and almost none May through August. So again the math looks right to me – most of their cases have been recent, so most are still active.

Actual discrepancies from the actual numbers in reality may also exist, in terms of what’s been noticed, reported, tested, and what’s considered active or recovered. That may differ from nation to nation.

@Zaku Thanks a lot. That really helps.