All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.
And now updated to mid-day 1/22/2021: Four more states, to a total of 26.
References for today’s additions
Prior post, 22 states have at least one case. Not clear that it’s actually spreading that fast, as states may now be finding it because they are looking for it. That said, it’s not going to be long before it’s been found more-or-less everywhere.
References for today’s additions:
Original post, Post #952, 14 states had at least one case.
Above: Nine days ago versus one day ago (data through 1/21/2021). Calculated from data via NY Times Github COVID data repository.
The trend is down, for the U.S. as a whole, and for almost every state. That’s not news if you’ve been following along.
The national rate at the top of this post is moving sharply downward mainly due to behavior in a few large states, particularly California (left, below). Helped by New York (right, below).
But in the median (typical) state, there’s a downward trend, but it’s anything but sharp. And what I have noticed lately is that North Dakota seems to be “asymptoting”, for want of a better verb. It’s not plunging toward zero cases. Instead, the rate is slowly drifting down. Just today, their seven-day moving average finally crossed below 20 cases / 100,000 / day.
In fact, for the Midwest as a whole, if you compare the pace at which the rates went up (left side of graph) to the rate at which they are doing down (right side of graph), the pace of reduction appears slower almost everywhere.
If the Midwest is the harbinger of the third wave, then what we look forward to is a prolonged period of elevated but slowly-declining rates of COVID. Not crisis levels. But not disappearance of the disease either. If this were a statistical distribution, we’d call that a “long right tail”. And it looks like we’re moseying toward that with COVID.
That’s unfortunate, given that we’re kind of in a race with the more contagious UK COVID variant. But it is what it is.
My already-stated belief is that this is the start of the end of the U.S. third wave of COVID That said, it looks to me like we’re heading for a long right tail. With the UK variant still in the background.
Every once in a while I stumble across separate pieces of seemingly-true data that make me question my own sanity.
When in fact, I should be questioning the sanity of others.
As I have noted before, flu vaccine is only about 60% effective in the best years. Most years, it’s not even that effective. (The graph on the left is from the U.S. CDC). Flu rarely kills anyone other than the frail elderly, and has a case mortality rate of about 0.1% in a typical year.* For most people, flu is a nuisance. And most people have some degree of native immunity against some prevalent strains of flu, every year.
* That’s flu as cause of death, divided by flu “cases”, that is, people who were formally diagnosed with flu. And that’s really the only hard number that exists, in this regard. If you see somebody citing something else, either they’re making it up, or they are using a denominator that is something other than diagnosed cases.
In short, with flu vaccine, we’re talking about a modestly-effective way to reduce the odds of catching a mostly-harmless short-lived disease. That you might not catch anyway, because you already have some of the right antibodies.
By contrast: The COVID-19 vaccine is being touted as 95% effective.** COVID kills a lot of people, and so far in this pandemic the U.S. case mortality rate rate is (400,000 / 24,100,000 =) about 1.6%.** And near as we can tell, nobody has native immunity to COVID.
** As discussed in earlier posts, the COVID effectiveness can’t be directly compared to the flu effectiveness. For COVID, that’s the effectiveness at preventing severe, symptomatic infections. They don’t actually know how good the vaccine is at preventing infection in total (including mild and asymptomatic infection), because they didn’t draw blood and test for antibodies. By contrast, the flu figure is the effectiveness at preventing all infections, as evidenced by presence of any antibodies to flu in the blood, whether or not flu symptoms were present.
*** See note above. Anybody who cites a vastly lower number is either making it up, or using some other denominator such as an estimate of all infections. In which case, the number would not be comparable to the 0.1% case mortality rate for flu. You see a lot of disinformation based on apples-and-oranges comparisons between some putative “all infections” mortality rate for COVID, and the standard case mortality rate for flu. That’s not a valid comparison.
So, COVID is more dangerous, the COVID vaccine is more effective, and fewer people have any immunity to COVID. Compared to flu. Those appear to be the facts.
And so, rationally, shouldn’t you be more willing to get the COVID vaccine than to get the flu vaccine? I mean, maybe you just dismiss all vaccines. OK. But for the more rational part of the population, shouldn’t you be more likely to get the COVID vaccine than the flu vaccine, given the facts?
Nope. Not if you’re Republican.
Here are results from two seemingly accurate national surveys. And I note that the COVID question specifically phrased it as “determined to be safe by scientists and free to everyone”. And that the December numbers were higher than estimates from September. If you were to have asked in September, Republicans were far less likely to say they’d get the COVID vaccine than the flu vaccine.
For four-out-of-ten Republicans, getting vaccinated is off the table. No matter what. Not if the vaccine is guaranteed safe. Not if it’s free. You literally can’t give it away to that crowd. Not even while the Republican POTUS is (incorrectly) taking credit for having developed the vaccine.
I’ve made up my mind, don’t confuse me with the facts? That’s pretty much how I read this. If that’s the attitude, then I guess there’s no arguing with it. It is what it is, and it’s not going to change. No matter what.
Luckily, screw ’em, we don’t need them. They’re irrelevant. Above is a modified version of the herd immunity calculation presented in a recent post. The upshot is that if people simply follow through with their intentions, given the current state of the world, we’ll still exceed the 70% level required for herd immunity. And, as long as the limiting factor is the shortage of vaccine, it makes no difference that more than 40% of Republicans refuse to be vaccinated. We’ll get there in the same amount of time, regardless.
So, ultimately, my take on it is, let them be ignorant. It doesn’t do the population as a whole any harm, assuming that the overall amount of vaccine available is the limiting factor. And assuming that 70% is the herd immunity level. (And that the vaccine literally prevents infections, including asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections, something that has not yet been shown.) Even if we achieved no more herd immunity via infections, Republican intransigence on COVID vaccination is irrelevant. We have enough rational people on both sides of the aisle to resolve this without them.
Source: Clipart library.com
Last year, in 2020, when the Federal government called up the national guard to set up flu vaccine centers, I was a little surprised. That, combined with the unprecedented mobilization of the United States Public Health Service to provide the needed medical personnel. But what truly got my attention, last year, was when FEMA was tasked with retrofitting existing mass gathering venues to be used as Chinese-style mass flu vaccination centers.
Wait. You don’t recall any of that? Thank goodness, because neither do I.
But how on earth else could the U.S. have delivered 192 million flu vaccines in the last five months of 2020? More than 100 million flu vaccines in the September and October alone, a span of roughly 60 days?
Was that some sort of miracle?
Nope. It was business as usual. It wasn’t even a particularly large number by historical U.S. standards. Continue reading Post #968: Vaccine strategy: Maybe we should try the boats first.
Above is a diagram I drew back around the end of April 2020.
I thought it would be worth doing a one-point-in time update of that same sketch, with current data. And then maybe review where things stand. Quick answer is, probably about half-way there, toward herd immunity.
I can’t update that prior diagram with a lot of precision. But I can do some estimate of it. So that’s what I line out, in this post.
There are four pools of people now assumed to have some immunity to COVID-19. Continue reading Post #967: Where are we on the goal of COVID-19 herd immunity?
Source: US CDC FluView interactive, 2017-2018 flu season. X-axis is week of the year, so this starts in week 40 of 2017.
I picked this particular flu season because it seemed to have just one major peak. And the question is, do all the states peak around the same time? Or are they scattered.
Here’s the state data, graphed. Underlying data are from the same source. I cut this off around week 25 of 2018.
It’s tough to say whether or not the eye is fooled. It does not appear that all the states peak around the same time. In fact, the two-humped US line (first graph above) is really the result of two different sets of states peaking at two different times.
But there does seem to be a fair degree of agreement across states in the timing of the end of flu season. That’s circled in blue above. You can say that either as “by the time it’s the end of flu season, every state has downward trend” or “by the time every state has a downward trend, that’s signalling the end of flu season”.
Either way, I think I’ve answered the question that I posed in my last post. You can, in fact, have a flu season with a high degree of correlation across states, in the winding-down of the flu season.
So the fact that all the states simultaneously show a drop in COVID cases is, in that context, not that unusual.
But it’s not clear that this is typical, either. If I move to the 2018-2019 season, we again have two peaks, due to two different sets of states. And, again, by the time you’re at the end of flu season, pretty much all the states are showing declines, all at the same time. Just starting from different levels.
What I’m trying to get at is that there does seem to be a fair degree of coordination of the end of flu season, across states. And it’s not a tautology. It’s not as if (e.g.) the Southern states get over it in January, and the Northern states continue the season out to March. To the contrary, you seem to find a few weeks when more-or-less all the states are showing declining flu incidence. And when that happens, that seems to flag the true end of the season.
I think my takeaway is that when the U.S. third wave of COVID is finally over, we probably ought to see all the state COVID rates declining, at the same time. Because that commonly happens for flu season.
If you’ve been following along, you know the drill by this time. Below are eight graphs. Two show the US as a whole — first for the US and six broad regions, and then a tangle of lines, one line for each state. Followed by six regional graphs, showing the states.
All the underlying data are from the NY Times Github COVID data repository. Data reported through 1/19/2021.
Near as I can tell, only South Carolina has a true upward trend. Virginia also appears to, but (per prior post) we won’t really know until a 1/17/2021 data reporting artifact works its way through the data. Continue reading Post #965: Everybody got the memo except South Carolina
Source: Calculated from NY Times Github COVID data repository and Commonwealth of Virginia COVID dashboard.
Red line is seven-day moving average excluding data for 1/17/2021. Blue line is seven-day moving average excluding data for 1/17/2021 and 1/16/2021. The reason for considering those exclusions is given below.
Continue reading Post #964: Virginia did, in fact, change some data reporting on 1/17/2021
These days, I’m seeing a lot of reporting on daily COVID deaths, and, as a totally new twist, on the total number of COVID patients currently in the hospital. But I’m not seeing much reporting on daily new COVID cases, or daily new hospital admissions.
Why? That’s because those first two are lagged indicators, and are still going up. It doesn’t go one inch deeper than that. Continue reading Post #963: COVID deaths, COVID total current hospitalizations, and the news hole.
You can read it at this link. It’s just one line in a much longer article.
“All of those metrics point to the conclusion that we may have passed the peak,” he said. ”
The person saying it is gen-u-ine college professor, at Georgetown University. So that’s worth something. And it got onto CNN. So that’s also worth something. Continue reading Post #962: “We may be past the peak” finally hits mainstream media
