Category: COVID through 2022

 

The U.S. new COVID-19 case rate declined over the past couple of days, and now stands at 32 new cases / 100K population per day.  That’s up just 7 percent over the past seven days.

Continue reading Post #1520: COVID-19 trend to 5/24, down to 32 new cases / 100K / day.

 

The U.S. remains at 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population, up just 15% in the past seven days.   This flattening of the curve is due primarily to the Northeast and Midwest regions, which saw no net increase in new cases over the past week.

Continue reading Post #1518: COVID-19 update to 5/23/2022, steady at 33 new cases per 100K

 

The U.S. now averages 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 22% in the past seven days. Continue reading Post #1517, COVID-19, finishing the data week, now 33/100K.

 

At this point, I could probably just copy a post from any random day in the past month or so, and I doubt anyone would notice.  New cases continue to grow roughly 25 percent per week.  Today’s case count of 31/100K/day is there just a matter of arithmetic, plus or minus some random variation. Continue reading Post #1516, COVID-19 trend, now 31/100K/day, rising 23%/week

 

The U.S. now stands at just over 30 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 33% in the past seven days. Continue reading Post #1515: COVID-19 trend, now 30/100K/day, up 33% in the past week.

 

The U.S. now stands at 28.5 new cases per 100K per day, up 32% in the past seven days.   That’s up from 26, as of last Friday’s reading. Continue reading Post #1514: COVID-19 trend, now 28.5/100K, up 32% in the past week.

 

The official count is still at 26 new cases per 100K population per day, an increase of 28% over the past seven days.  Rounded to the nearest whole number.  Same as yesterday.

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 5/13/2022, 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

I guess there are only a few things left to say.

First, nobody really knows what the actual new case count is.  That’s been true all along — at best, half of cases were captured by the official reporting — but there’s a nagging suspicion that the gap between the true and official case counts has been rising.  Can’t prove it, but between cheap and plentiful home testing, and a large degree of immunity in the population (suggesting that severe cases would become an increasingly small portion of all cases), it’s a good bet that it is. For sure, the last fix we got — via the CDC seroprevalence survey — suggested that the ratio of total infections to official infections was expanding.  It used to be a bit above 1:1, but as of the February 2022, cumulative for the entire pandemic, that had risen to 1.4:1.  Because that’s cumulative for the entire pandemic, that suggests a pretty large shift in the most recent months, in order to move the entire average up that much.

Source:  Post #1498, calculated from CDC seroprevalence survey data, COVID data tracker accessed 5/2/2022.

That said, deaths are still not rising  — they are still around 300/day — and hospitalizations still have not reached 3000 per day.  So there’s a lot of new cases, but not a lot of severe new cases.  As discussed in earlier posts, I’m pretty sure that’s a consequence of the change in the vaccinated/unvaccinated mix of new cases.  The vaccine and (particularly) booster still provide good protection against severe illness, even if they provide little protection against getting some COVID-19 infection after a few months.

Finally, this seems like it’s just getting started and/or there seems to be no hint that this is slowing down.  Note that the regions that started this the earliest (e.g., the Northeast, top line above) have had cases rising at a more-or-less steady rate since the end of March.  (That graphs as a straight line on the log chart at the top of this post).  Meanwhile, other regions — most of the middle of the country — are only now joining this wave.  Both of those suggest this has a lot longer to run.

Around here, informally at least, I think I’m seeing a turnaround in mask use, as Fairfax County, VA tops 40 new cases per 100K in the official stats.  Today, mask use was nearly uniform at both stores I briefly visited.  My wife perceives an age gap, as almost all older people are masked, and few younger people are.  That makes perfect sense from an every-man-for-himself personal protection standpoint.  Which is, I think, all we’re going to have in the U.S. moving forward.

 

Now 26 new cases per 100K population per day, up 28% in the past week.   The BA.2.12.1 wave now looks well-organized in every region except the Mountain states, where Colorado still does not show a strong upward trend.

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 5/13/2022, 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

At this point, new cases are rising almost everywhere.  There were only five states where new cases did not increase in the past seven days.

This post tries to communicate a few related points:

• This is no longer a pandemic of the unvaccinated.  The majority of new cases are among vaccinated individuals.
• And yet, only the unvaccinated remain at high risk of hospitalization and death.
• As a result, the apparent severity of the average new case has fallen.  That’s not because “the virus is getting weaker”.  It’s because new cases are increasingly occurring among the vaccinated who, by and large, won’t die from it.
• But now, nothing stops chains of infection.  Not vaccination, because efficacy against any Omicron infection is low.  Not masks, because the overwhelming majority of the population faces little risk of serious illness, and they’re not going to mask up merely to protect others.
• As a result, this is a really bad time to be an unvaccinated elderly person.  Plausibly, the worst since the start of the pandemic.

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In my prior post, I noted our current bout of pandemic agnosticism.  One year ago, anything like the current new case rate and increase would have led to prayers for divine relief.  Now, we just shrug it off.

This is mostly rational, I think.  Assuming that people act in their narrow self-interest.

There are still only about 300 deaths a day attributed to COVID (based on the CDC COVID data tracker).  All the breathless headlines you read about how COVID-19 deaths are doing this-or-that are therefore mostly nonsense.  When you get down to an average of six deaths / state / day, with new case loads shifting rapidly across states, anybody who thinks they can parse out the fine points of time trends is kidding you.  And likely kidding themselves.

(As a point of reference, a typical U.S. flu season results in maybe 37,500 deaths, mainly over a five-month period, or an average seasonal flu death rate of about 250 deaths a day.)

And we still haven’t hit 3,000 new hospital admissions per day.  Nor are there any states where the hospital system is stressed by the COVID-19 case load (as measured by more than 30% of ICU beds devoted to COVID-19 patients.)

(Again as a point of reference, a typical flu season results in about 380,000 hospitalizations, or about 2500 a day during a (say) five-month flu season.  The whole flu-versus-COVID writeup starts with Post #1400, part 3.  Note that in both cases, if you’re vaccinated, your risks are far lower than the risks you would face from seasonal flu, as the unvaccinated disproportionately account for COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations.)

I attribute both of those to the peculiar way in which the vaccinated (and possibly those with prior infections) are losing immunity against the BA.1.12.1.  As shown in yesterday’s post, vaccines still provide good protection against severe disease.  But at this point, they appear to provide little protection against getting infected.  As a matter of arithmetic, then, as immunity against any infection fades, a higher proportion of all infections is occurring among the vaccinated.  And so, occurring in a population for whom infections are far less likely to proceed to hospitalization and death.

Six months ago, this was truly a pandemic of the unvaccinated:  The overwhelming majority of cases (and hospitalizations, and deaths) were among the unvaccinated.  Here’s Virginia as of September 2021.  This chart is a little extreme, but not atypical for that time period.

Here’s the same chart, with the most recent data from Virginia.

Source:  Calculated from Virginia Department of Health, COVID-19 cases by vaccination status, accessed 5-12-2022.

It’s no longer true that this is a pandemic of the un-vaccinated.  Not in terms of new cases.  That’s in small part because the number of vaccinated persons has increased.  But it’s in much larger part because the efficacy of the vaccine against any infection (from BA.2 or BA.2.1.12) has fallen.  As a result, depending on the week, in Virginia, the unvaccinated account for the bare majority of cases (or, in weeks just prior, were actually the minority of new cases).

But in terms of deaths and hospitalizations, sure, this is still a pandemic of the unvaccinated.  As of February, COVID-19 still had a 2 percent case mortality rate among the unvaccinated.  One-in-50 of those formally diagnosed with it died from it.  Regardless of the new monoclonal-this-and-that now available to treat it.

You see a lot of popular-press and social-media mis-reporting of this phenomenon.  Despite any significant change in the virus, people are reporting this as if the virus itself has somehow magically become weaker.  Independent of its relatively stable genome.  And those who report that, and repeat that, never stop to consider the literal impossibility of that, absent major change in the virus’ genes.

This “virus has gotten weaker” meme simply isn’t true.  Omicron (BA.2) is the same now as it was five months ago.  It’s just that the vaccinated are getting infections at a high rate now, and those infections by-and-large do not progress to serious illness.

There’s an odd consequence of this, in that the U.S. population now splits into a vast majority that really has nothing major to worry about from COVID.  And a small minority — call it the unvaccinated elderly — who remain at high risk of death, if they should become infected.

If this new-case growth keeps up, it’s going to be a really bad time to be an older person who is unvaccinated.  Why?  Because at this point, there’s no way to stop the chains of infection.  Sure, almost nobody is dying from it, or even being hospitalized for it.  But on the flip side, almost nobody is maintaining COVID-19 hygiene in any form.  And a mostly-vaccinated population now provides almost no barrier to circulation of the disease.

Back when vaccination provided good immunity against any infection, a mostly-vaccinated retirement community / assisted living facility / nursing home provided pretty good protection for those who refused (or could not undergo) vaccination.  The vaccine holdouts lived within an infection-resistant herd.

But now?  As of February, vaccination provided only scant protection against infection.  It appeared to cut your odds of any infection in half.  By now, it’s probably less.

The upshot is that for the unvaccinated at-risk (e.g., elderly), this is a new phase of the pandemic.  New-case rates are higher than they have been for most of the pandemic.  But now, in terms of disease transmission, it’s almost as if vaccines and masks don’t exist.  Vaccines, because they no longer protect (much) against any infection, masks because most won’t wear them now.

And, as icing on the cake, we have a popular press telling those vaccine holdouts that it’s OK, “the virus is getting weaker”.  When that’s simply not true, and the case mortality rate for the unvaccinated remains at 2 percent.

And so this most recent wave of the U.S. pandemic is devolving into an odd sort of inadvertent Darwin test.  We’re not merely back to the point where nothing will materially prevent the spread of infection.  We’re at the point where most people see no reason to engage in any COVID-19 hygiene either.  And then we have a small fraction of the at-risk population who won’t get vaccinated and so remain at risk of serious illness from COVID-19.

And so, we approach a sort of rational no-golden-rule equilibrium.  Sure, all of us can spread it now, but few of us face significant risk from it.  For the unvaccinated who have not yet been infected, arguably, a given level of daily new cases puts them at higher risk now than it did at any prior time in the pandemic.

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 5/12/2022