It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these posts. Partly due to being busy, partly due to being burnt out, partly due to “how can I write ‘yep, everything is still terrible’ each week without repeating myself?”. And honestly, it’s been weird to realize that even though the situation in Indiana is worse than it has been at any point in the pandemic, it doesn’t feel that much worse to me. I realize how incredibly fortunate I am to be able to say that.
Since my last update, vaccines have received emergency use authorization and are in the early stages of being distributed. It will be months before we have widespread vaccination, but at least there’s hope. Of all the jobs I’m glad I don’t have, “decider of who gets vaccinated first” is one that I’m most glad about.
I haven’t made any major structural changes to my dashboard. The main difference is some tweaks to the model forecast graph to make it easier to read (I hope).
Deaths
Anyway, the Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model runs keep nudging the total fatalities up. This is a reflection of how rapidly deaths have risen in the last month. The latest model run brings us to a peak of ~102 daily deaths in Indiana on January 5. It seems to track the general trend in the reported data pretty well, if you ignore the last few days. As the number of deaths has risen, it seems that the counts now frequently go up significantly for two or three days after, instead of just the day after. If anything, the model may be too optimistic.

Hospitalizations
There is good news, though. While October and November featured a rapid rise in hospitalizations, with new records set almost every day, that trend has largely reversed. Even with the Thanksgiving holiday, we’re starting to see declines in hospitalizations most days. If that holds for a few more days, we might get below the 3,000 mark for the first time in over a month. As it stands, yesterday’s hospital census had about 13% fewer patients than the peak on November 30.

Despite the downward trend in hospitalizations, the available ICU bed capacity continues to hold steady near 20%. Interestingly, non-COVID cases are driving this, according to the state’s dashboard. COVID ICU bed and ventilator usage, while still much higher than over the summer, is trending downward.
What I’m watching
In the coming week, I’ll be watching to see if the lower death tolls the last few days hold. It seems unlikely that there’s such a sudden drop in deaths. Tuesday and Wednesday of this week had a bunch of backdated deaths added to the report. I would expect the same next week.
With the coming Christmas and New Year holidays, the testing and new case data is about to get unreliable. But I’m interested to see if the apparent uptick in positivity holds or if we return to the general downward trend of the last two weeks. As of today’s update, we’re at 12.4% for all tests (24.4% individuals) statewide. This is very bad.