Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Johns Hopkins is winding down its three-year effort to track the COVID numbers. That’s a pretty good signal that it’s time to wind this down as well. For now, both the New York Times and the CDC continue to track the data. If you want something reasonably up-to-date, you can look there.
As it stands, the number of new cases continues to recede slowly. We’re now down to an average of 10 new cases / 100K population / day, down from 12 last week. And it’s getting on toward Spring, when incidence of viral respiratory illness normally declines. So I expect that the numbers will continue on that slow downward trend, moving forward.
I might check this one last time, a month from now, just to see where things stand. But right now, this is what we live with. No point in saying anything more.
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 2/16/2023, 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
I’ve reworked my “COVID odds” table one last time. At the current rate of 10 new cases per 100K per day, the left half shows you odds of being exposed to COVID in various sized of gatherings. The right half shows your odds of being exposed to COVID in a year’s worth of weekly gatherings of that size.
So, for example, at the current rate of 10 / `100K / day, if you attend church weekly, and the church holds about 250 people, over the course of a year, it’s virtually 100% certain that at some point, you’ll be sharing that church space with somebody who is actively infectious with COVID.
To be clear, being in the same room as somebody with COVID does not mean that you will be infected. But it’s still worth keeping in mind that even though the pandemic is over, COVID is now like flu. If you attend enough public meetings, you will get exposed to it. It’s just a fact of life.
