Some Good News on COVID

Some Good News on COVID

There have been many news headlines about the increase in COVID cases which may be scaring people. I saw graphs on Monday that I wanted to share with you. Each of these numbers are the 7-day average for the week ending October 25th-

• Daily tests are averaging 1.10 million. I was surprised to see how high this number is.
• Daily cases diagnosed is 69k or about 6.3% of the daily tests are diagnosed positively.
• Hospitalizations are averaging 40k a day. This number peaked at nearly 60k a day in both early April and early August. Even though the number of new cases has increased the hospitalization rate has dropped which is good news.
• Deaths have averaged 805 a day over this last week, down from a high of over 2,000 a day in early April. This puts the "death rate" at 1.17% of the new cases average. Back in April this percentage was 5% or higher. It's great to see this number has dropped by 77%!

In summary, we are seeing more cases because our testing numbers have increased dramatically. Thankfully, both our hospitalization and death rates have dropped substantially. So, we are making progress against COVID which is really good news.

Why do I tell you this? As the hospitalization rate and death rates continue to drop and/or a vaccine(s) are created I expect mortgage rates will start to rise as economic growth will increase.