This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-11-22, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, as well as basic copy-edits, may have been made in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
Attached are the weekly coronavirus graphs, courtesy of the Covid Tracking Project.
If you look at hospitalizations, starting October 3, there were about 30 thousand people in the hospital. If you move forward seven days at a time till you reach yesterday, the numbers are 35, 37, 42, 47, 56, 69, and 83 thousand people in the hospital.
There is good news on the horizon. Large-scale distribution of vaccines will likely begin about December 11th, and Mancef Slaoui estimates that by May about 70% of the population will be vaccinated.[1] In other words, between vaccinations and natural immunity due to getting the disease, we will most likely hit herd immunity some time this spring. At that point, with or without social distancing, the disease will no longer be able to infect large numbers of people.
I'm not into concerts myself, but if you are, the concert scene will probably be absolutely nuts this summer.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The graphs were produced as part of The Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC-BY-4.0 license.
- (6-2-21) The number, in fact, came to about 62.6%, if we generously count from the end of May. See the CDC's COVID Data Tracker.↩︎