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Coping with COVID: U.S. COVID-19 deaths expected to show a drop next week

Prevention efforts toward containing the spread of COVID-19 are likely to begin showing, U.S. CDC director reminding the public that these efforts have a lag and that by next week the nation should see the death rate drop.

Encouraging news comes from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield, who said that mitigation measures toward the spread of COVID-19 have a delayed effect which could be seen starting next week.

“It is important to understand these interventions are going to have a lag, that lag is going to be three to four weeks,” Redfield said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Hopefully this week and next week you’re going to start seeing the death rate really start to drop.”

Some reason for optimism can be found in the numbers where the virus has been most prevalent over the past two months. In Texas, one of the states hardest hit since June, the rolling 7-day average death total dipped to 174 on Thursday, down from the peak of 227 on Aug. 4.

That roughly corresponds with what medical officials have observed in terms of the lethality of the virus; a number of countries have reported that when cases do prove fatal, death generally occurs within 13-18 days after onset of symptoms. The peak for confirmed cases there came July 15.

And in states that suffered the most as the outbreak took hold in the U.S.—New York and New Jersey in particular—numbers for confirmed cases and deaths surged, peaked, then fell by about 90 percent, all within about 90 days.

All of those metrics were compiled by worldometers.com.