Today’s data are a bit sketchy owing to the Columbus Day federal holiday. About a third of states reported no data or trivial counts of new cases. So take this for what it’s worth.
The U.S. stands at 28.6 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, down from 30 last Friday. We’re now 44% below the 9/1/2021 peak. Continue reading Post #1284: COVID-19 update to 10/11/2021
As fall progresses, it’s time to start looking out for the first frost. For open-air gardeners, that’s when you either start hassling with some sort of overnight frost protection, or you call it quits for the year on any frost-sensitive plants.
I still have a lot of things growing in my garden that I would like to harvest before first frost. These are plants that survived the summer (peppers, sweet potatoes) and vegetables planted specifically for fall harvest (lettuce, spinach, peas, green beans, eggplant).
For Vienna, VA, in Zone 7, first frost is expected on or about October 24 (Post #G21-052). That’s the “30th percentile” first frost date. Over the past three decades, first frost has occurred on or after that date 70 percent of the time.
As I noted in earlier posts, the “last spring frost” and “first fall frost” concepts are crude. They are unconditional probabilities, that is, they simply summarize what occurred in the past. They don’t account for the current weather this year, and they don’t account for the presence of long-term (e.g., ten-day) forecasts.
For the spring last frost date, the presence of good long-term (e.g., ten-day) forecasts shifts the odds in your favor (Post #G21-005). That happens because you won’t plant if frost is in the forecast. That obvious observation converts the unconditional “30th percentile” spring date into a conditional “10th percentile” date. Just by keeping an eye on the 10-day forecast in the spring, you can cut your odds of a post-planting frost from 30% to 10%.
The same should be true of the fall first-frost date, but without any significant real-world consequences. As with the spring date, the current ten-day forecast should help you predict the first-frost date more accurately than the simple unconditional 30th percentile date. But unlike spring, the plants are already in the ground. This might give you a bit longer time to plan when to harvest the last of your garden, but that’s about it.
The statement above ignores the potential for significant predictive help from “seasonal forecasts”, which I take to mean forecasts of average weather conditions made months in advance. There are a lot of issues there, the foremost of which being that these tend to be vague (e.g., the prediction will be whether or not a season will warmer or colder, wetter or dryer, than usual).
To put it plainly, even if the forecast is for a warmer-than-normal fall, nobody has done the analysis to translate that into a specific prediction for the fall first frost date. It’s not even clear if it is feasible to do that. And so, this year, the prediction is for a warm fall in this area (e.g., this reporting, or this reporting). But I have no clue what that implies for first frost date.
You can access the official U.S. seasonal climate forecasts on-line. As is the custom for the modern age, you can go play with them in an interactive map, courtesy of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, below:
Source: NOAA.gov
NOAA says there’s a good chance that temperatures will be warmer than normal in my area. I’m sure that’s helpful to somebody, but surely not to me. I’m guessing that’s about as good as they can do, and, given the inherently (mathematically) chaotic nature of weather, that may be about as well as they will ever be able to do.
As a result, I’m not holding out much hope for a super-accurate seasonal forecast. Instead, I’m sticking with the idea that the only actionable information is the current ten-day forecast.
Source: The Weather Channel, accessed 10/11/2021.
Based on today’s ten-day forecast for my area, I have little to worry about regarding the 10/24 first frost date.
I’d like to ask a couple of questions, given this forecast, but I don’t have the data, and I don’t think I can get my hands on the data. First, I’d like to know the odds that it actually will freeze on October 24th, given that the forecast low is in the high 40’s. I would also like to estimate what the actual first frost date is likely to be, given this forecast. Both of those would require having historical data on the 10-day forecasts. And, while I’m sure that somebody has stored that information, there’s no way for me to get my hands on it.
In any case, this has almost zero practical importance. The only change this makes in my gardening is for two remaining pumpkin plants that I was about to pull out. These were late to set fruit, to the point where neither of them was going to be able to produce an edible pumpkin by October 24. I was about to clear that bed and set that up for over-wintering.
But now, given this forecast for warmth almost two weeks into the future, I think I’ll let them go. You never know what another couple of weeks of growing season might bring.
I’m getting ready to can some pickled vegetables, so I decided to take one last look at the 2021 canning lid shortage.
Upshot: It’s a problem that was never resolved. Even now, in most parts of the country, you aren’t going to be able to go to your local store and buy Ball wide-mouth canning lids.
I first stumbled across the pandemic-driven shortage of home canning supplies last year (Post #G12, July 2020). At that point, I had to look around a bit to find wide-mouth jars. I noted the logical progression from that year’s shortage of garden seeds, to last year’s shortage of common garden chemicals, to, inevitably, last year’s shortage of canning supplies. By August 2020 stories about the canning supply shortage had gone mainstream (Post #G21, August 2020).
In 2020, a shortage didn’t really stand out. The first pandemic year was rife with shortages of consumer goods. (Fill in toilet paper joke here.) A shortage of canning supplies was nothing unusual. It was just one of many.
And it’s not as if a shortage of canning supplies had never happened before in the U.S. During the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, and the resulting U.S. energy crises, Americans faced a shortage of canning lids (documented in Post #G21-003, March 2021).
The roots of that shortage were attributed to the same source as the modern shortage. Insecure people instinctively turn to growing their own food, and as a result, there’s an increased demand for home canning supplies that can’t be met by the existing supply chain.
But I was more than a bit surprised to hear that there was still a shortage of canning lids in spring of 2021 (Post #G21-003, March 2021). Seriously, that was then, this is now. This is America. We don’t do shortages. I more-or-less laughed it off, figuring that once manufacturers started shipping product for the 2021 canning season, the shortage would disappear. That, after pointing out how irrational the price of lids had become. Vendors were asking more for twelve lids than for twelve jars — the joke being that jars come with lids.
My assumption that the early 2021 canning lid shortage would go away was dead wrong. Except for a brief period this spring when the new shipments arrived for the 2021 canning season, canning lids have been in-and-out-of-stock ever since.
It’s an odd sort of shortage, in that you can go on-line and order lids at any time. So it’s not as if lids are unavailable. It’s more that name-brand lids cost three times the pre-pandemic price. So you either pay far more for lids, you make do with imported lids of dubious quality, or you switch to re-usable lids (Post #G21-010) of a sort that are not familiar to most canners.
Or, at a last resort, re-use your canning lids. While I never had to do that, but I did check out the method of boiling used lids for 20 minutes. That’s supposed to remove the groove in the silicone from the prior use, making them more nearly fit for re-use. And my observation is that boiling them does, in fact, relax the old groove in the silicone sealing material, as shown in the contrast of an un-boiled and boiled used lid, below.
One final oddity of the U.S. situation is that we’re dealing with a monopoly supplier, more-or-less. All of the familiar top-drawer brands of U.S. lids (Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest) are made by one subsidiary of a corporate conglomerate (documented in Post #G21-009). The history of the one U.S. lid manufacturer — bought and sold and re-sold — is like a short course in what has gone wrong with U.S. industry.
In the end, my summary is that Ball canning isn’t even rounding error on the bottom line of its current owner, Newell Brands. They’re the only supplier of trusted domestic single-use canning lids. And as a result, they may not have to care very much if they meet home canners’ needs or not.
As of today (10/9/2021), my local Warmart has wide-mouth Ball lids back in stock, at the normal price of about $0.30 per lid. And while that’s great for me, and while I check my local stores periodically, that doesn’t really indicate what the lid situation looks like nationally.
In the spring, I took 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes, and used the Walmart website to check local availability of wide-mouth Ball lids (Post #G21-025). The results are shown below, with only 15% of stores having those lids in stock at that time.
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Source: Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.
Mid-summer, I tried to repeat that. But by mid-summer, Walmart had simply pulled the listing for Ball wide-mouth jars off their website entirely. I couldn’t repeat the analysis because I could no longer search for that product on their website.
But now that item is back on the Walmart website. And, while the format of the results has changed a bit, the bottom line remains just about the same. At the end of the 2021 canning season, the vast majority of Walmarts have no Ball wide-mouth lids on the shelf.
Source: Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.
One further interesting change is that Walmart won’t ship you three packages of lids, at a reasonable price, as they were sometimes willing to do back in the spring. If the lids weren’t in stock, in every case, Walmart offered you a single internet vendor who would sell you wide-mouth lids for more than $1 each.
The bottom line is that the 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved. Near as I can tell, the situation at the end of the canning season is just about the same as it was this past spring. In large parts of the country, you probably can’t go into your local stores and buy wide-mouth canning lids.
This has dropped out of national news entirely. You’ll still see a tiny bit of reporting in areas where home canning is common, as in this August 2021 piece from Minnesota, or this farm-oriented article in June 2021.
I don’t know if there’s a larger lesson in this or not. I had a reader email me about the monopoly-supplier aspect of this shortage (to which I am now sorry that I never replied). The idea being that the concentration of market share into fewer and fewer hands, throughout the U.S. and global economies, is giving results that are not in consumers’ best interests. While I’d certainly believe that monopolies are bad for consumers, I have no way to know whether the persistence of the shortage of this plain-vanilla, low-tech product is in any way related to the near-monopoly position of the Newell Brands conglomerate.
Canada, for example, seems to face the same monopoly supplier situation as the U.S., with the two major brands there (Bernardin, Golden Harvest) owned by Newell Brands (via its Jarden subsidiary). And yet, despite monopoly supply there as well, there does not seem to have been a Canadian canning lid shortage.
So it remains a puzzle. Going on two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s still hard to get hold of name-brand canning lids in the U.S. Of all the shortages you might have expected, that has to be pretty close to the bottom of the list. And yet, of all the shortages we faced, this seems to be among the most persistent.
If you want to see my list of what you can do if you can’t get Ball/Kerr/Golden Harvest lids, try the end of Post #G21-020.
The U.S. is now 42% below the 9/1/2021 peak of the Delta wave, down 11% in the past seven days. We now stand at an average of 30 cases per 100,000 population per day.
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 10/9/2021, 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.
We’re still waiting for the winter wave to start. If history is going to repeat itself, then the highlighted lines above should begin to turn sharply upward next week. That’s my diagnostic for whether or not we’ll have a winter wave.
That’s the fraction of infections that are breakthrough infections. “Breakthrough” being the term-of-art for infections among individuals who are vaccinated.
Let me start with a little clarity. Virginia updated its COVID-19 numbers “by vaccination status”, to the week ending 10/2/2021. They look like this:
Source: Calculated from Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard data.
Now, before we go a step further, let’s note the obvious. Note the GREAT BIG SECTION OF THE PIE that is attributable to those who are NOT VACCINATED.
Obvious, right? Last week, in Virginia, 82% of infections were among un-vaccinated individuals.
A less dramatic but more informative way to present the data is to show both the fraction of the population, and the fraction of infections. This way, the intelligent reader can correctly infer that INFECTIONS ARE GROSSLY AND DISPROPORTIONATELY CONCENTRATED AMONG THE UN-VACCINATED.
Source: Calculated from Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard data.
Again, not exactly rocket science to deliver a clear and unambiguous message.
The problem is, this is straight-up dog-bites-man messaging. Vaccines are supposed to prevent infection, and they do. Ho hum. That’s hardly news.
And, to be clear, this is more-or-less the way the state-level numbers look everywhere. And that’s because, once again, the COVID-19 vaccines work fairly well, regardless of location.
So not only is it boring, it’s the same everywhere you look.
In the modern world, that’s insufficient click-bait. That doesn’t bring the eyeballs that fuel the advertising revenues that make the news industry run.
And so, inevitably, headlines for half the articles about breakthrough infections have to make it seem as if vaccines don’t work. The stories themselves always seem to present the facts. But the headlines come out of a different universe entirely.
I don’t know if the editors who create those headlines really are sympathetic to the nut-o-verse of anti-vaccine forces, and want to give them some (non-factual) basis to sustain their beliefs. Or, maybe they’re just scrambling for advertising dollars, and figure the contrarian headlines suggesting that vaccines don’t work will help that. Or maybe it just tickles their fancy to fashion a headline that’s so clearly contrary to the content of the story.
There is a serious public health issue here, beyond the rate of vaccination. Immunity fades over time, and booster shots will become increasingly necessary if you want to maintain an optimal level of protection.
But, as is clear from the simple graphs above, that’s a far cry from saying that the current COVID-19 vaccines don’t work. In my opinion, every state health department ought to be producing their own version of the first graph above.
In a world where we all get our information from the internet, sometimes you really need to slap people in the face with the simple, obvious, and correct story. Because you can be sure that, intentionally or otherwise, somebody else is out there doing their best to muddy up the waters.
The Fall 2021 COVID-19 outbreak continues to wind down.
This table, with one line per week, corrects a small math error I made in the prior version, with one line per day. Continue reading Post #1282: William and Mary weekly update
Source for featured image: groundhog.org.
The U.S. stands at 30.6 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population per day.
That’s down 40% since the 9/1/2021 peak of the Delta wave, and down 11% over the past seven days.
That’s about the extent of what you’ll see in mainstream coverage of this.
And while that’s true, it’s not the entire story. Three regions are still at the peak of their respective Delta waves. Those are the ones to watch now. Continue reading Post #1281: COVID-19 trend to 10/7/2021.
Currently, the U.S. as a whole is seeing 31 new COVID-19 cases / 100K / day.
Daily new COVID-19 cases for the The U.S. are now 40% lower than at the 9/1/2021 peak of the Delta wave.
That 40% decline since 9/1/2021 is made up of:
The U.S. new case rates continue to fall. Alaska appears to be well and truly over its hospital capacity crisis.
As of today, U.S. new COVID-19 cases / 100K / day stands at 31.5, down 39 percent from the 9/1/2021 Delta peak, and down 12% over the past seven days.
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 10/6/2021, 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.
Continue reading Post #1279: COVID-19 trend to 10/5/2021: No change
The count of daily new cases continues to decline. The U.S. now stands at 32.2 new cases per 100K per day, down 37 percent from the 9/1/2021 peak and down 12 percent over the past seven days. The overall decline continues to be driven by rapid reductions in new cases in the South.
Continue reading Post #1278: COVID-19 trend to 10/4/2021: No winter wave yet
This is the New York Times map of current new COVID-19 case rates by county. With my annotation as to how I interpret it.
Source: Map is from the New York Times, with my annotations in black.
The first thing that strikes the eye is the sharp difference between western and eastern Oregon and Washington. There’s a nice straight line between the two. In part, that’s due to the shapes of the counties there. But mostly, that’s due to the Rocky Mountains.
The western parts of those states are wet and have relatively mild winters. The eastern parts are relatively arid and have cold winters.
I’m sure there are other differences as well, but that’s how I perceive that line. That’s a little test case of wet versus dry climates.
Then, in general, the middle section of the country right now splits between the area with bitterly cold and and relatively arid winters, and the rest of it. Again, I’m seeing that as the first fingerprints of indoor relative humidity differences.
Finally, on the East Coast, the hotspots of new case growth now are mountain areas. West Virginia seems to take a lot of blame for low vaccination rate. But Maine, as I recall, has one of the highest in the nation. What they have in common is that thinner air and colder temperatures than their adjacent areas. Higher-elevation areas are showing (what I interpret as) the onset of the winter wave first.
Meanwhile, the entire U.S. humid U.S. south is still recovering from the Delta wave. Hotspots there are few and far between.
I’ve presented the evidence for the importance of indoor humidity before (Post #894), so there’s no point repeating it. The only change is that today, I looked at that map and said, there’s no way we’re going to miss a winter wave, if it’s already shaping up like this.
So, while the aggregate U.S. trend remains down, I really don’t think we’re going to skip a winter wave this year. The rising hotspots are already shaping up along the lines of humidity and partial pressure of water vapor. At least, that’s how I read it today.
