One more look at COVID numbers

 Given that my fit of a lognormal to excess deaths in my previous post worked so well, 

I thought I would revisit the stats and see how things were going two months later and whether I might need to add a third wave to the fit.

The actual national numbers don't appear to support that, so I thought perhaps I would take the state-by-state data (from the CDC) and see if there were separate patterns that made up the whole curve. I still couldn't see much in the way of a third wave, but this illuminated the first and second waves quite a bit:

Each trace is a single state (plus DC and PR with NYC separated out) of the absolute number by which all-cause mortality exceeded the high end of the expected range. Note that you would not even see the normal winter flu mortality peak in such a graph: the "expected" number goes up along with the actual deaths.

It's the orange line on this graph. It cycles between 50 to 60 thousand deaths per week over the course of a normal year. Note in particular that it's going up now, as people are not outside as much and not getting as much Vitamin D. Also note that the total number of people dying from any cause whatsoever is flattening and they will soon cross.

The major thing to note in the first graph is that the states making up the bulk of the first wave are different than the states making up the second wave. To a rough approximation, each state only gets one wave. States that didn't participate in the April or August waves are now getting their own waves, incoherently, so there's no distinct third wave but a statistical mush.

Here's the same graph again, but instead of absolute numbers we have the percentage over expected deaths for the particular state:

Now the vertical scale is percent. New York got up to 6 times the expected death rate in April, but nowhere got much more than 50% in August, and the average in the statistical mush is getting back down to zero, with a spread of 10-20%.

Note that that's not quite normal: normal is that the TOP of the spread is zero, as on the left-hand side of the graph a month before the pandemic hit. But remember the average American has a roughly 1% chance of dying in a given year; now he has a 1.1% chance of dying next year. Unless the vaccines work out, of course.