The U.S. is now down to 17 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down 29% for the week. It looks like we’ve entered an era of a slower rate of reduction in new cases, but we haven’t settled down into our “endemic” rate yet.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 3/1/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Count your blessings, part 1: U.S. versus the rest of the world.
To put our good fortune in context, the U.S. now has fewer reported new cases than the U.K., despite having almost exactly five times the population.
Source: Johns Hopkins data via Google search.
In fact, if you look at first-world countries around the globe, you would be hard-pressed to find one that has a lower per-capita new case rate than the U.S. Even New Zealand, which managed to suppress COVID-19 for so long, is now in the midst of an Omicron wave.
Here’s a graph to get that across:
Source: Our World in Data.
The scale of the graph hides it, but the closest Western European countries have new case rates that are several multiples of the current rate in the U.S.
If I were of the fuzzy-thinking ilk, I’d attribute this to the moral fiber of current U.S. leadership. (And why not? All the crazies attribute every evil to some lack thereof.)
But a more rational person would have to point to Canada, which has a slightly lower per-capita new case rate than the U.S. Arguably, there’s something about North America that distinguishes it from the rest of the world, right at this moment. (N.B., On paper, Mexico has about half the per-capita new case rate of the U.S. or Canada, but I suspect there’s significant under-reporting of cases there.)
I don’t know why North American is doing so well at the moment. And nobody else does, either. So count your blessings.
Count your blessings part 2: This year versus last year at this time.
We now have fewer daily new cases than we had in March 2021. And, unlike then, the new case counts are continuing to fall.
It’s worth recalling that in March 2021, only a small fraction of the population — mostly the elderly and critical health and safety workers — had been vaccinated:
Source: CDC COVID data tracker
It’s worth recalling that Omicron is less virulent than earlier strains. And that we now have some approved medications (including anti-virals and monclonal antibodies) as on-label treatment options that did not exist at that time.
The upshot is that the vaccinated-and-boostered population is facing the same population incidence of COVID-19 now as it was last year. But it’s now a weaker strain, they have some protection against infection, they have more protection against hospitalization and death, and there are now modestly-effective treatments for those with severe disease.
The upshot is that a boostered individual now faces less risk than the average individual faced a year ago.
And yet, for the population as a whole, overall hospitalization and death rates are nearly the same now as they were a year ago. And that’s because, to a large degree, for the unvaccinated, the pandemic is now worse than it was a year ago. For January 2022 (firmly in the Omicron era), CDC estimates that the unvaccinated have seven times the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization, compared to the vaccinated, and nine times the risk compared to those who are boostered (per the CDC COVID data tracker).
A year ago, we were almost all in the same boat, and most people took precautions. As I’ve shown several times, about 90% of the population reported always or nearly always wearing a mask outside the home. And the then-prevalent strain was not nearly as infectious as Omicron.
Source: Carnegie-Mellon COVIDcast
Now, the unvaccinated are increasingly on their own. As a higher percentage of the population drops their COVID-19 hygiene, each new case of the far-more-infectious Omicron represents a higher risk to the unvaccinated. As we drop all pretense of public health measures, “the public” is no longer in the business of offering any protection to the unvaccinated.
And so, I suspect that the remaining unvaccinated portion of the adult U.S. population will continue to have a fairly rough time of it. Even at the current low new case rates. The unvaccinated face substantially higher risk of infection now, under Omicron, at current case rates, than they did one year ago, with the same level of new cases.
But, for now, if you’re boostered, in the U.S., your risk are lower than they were at this time last year.
The situation could easily change. Everyone expects vaccine effectiveness to fall as the time elapsed since the last vaccine shot increases. The only question is, how much will vaccine effectiveness fall over time? In the U.S., the persistently high hospitalization and death rates, and an increased share of deaths among the elderly, all suggest that vaccine-based immunity may be falling among those who were first to get vaccinated and boostered.
Every time I see that cases are rising again in Great Britain, it gives me pause. See graph above. What could be causing that, and is that going to happen here?
But for now, I’m just not going to worry about it. It’s almost Spring, reported new case rates are falling. Hospitalizations are falling. (Deaths, not so much, and it’s not clear why). Count your blessings while you can.
