2020-11-29

This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-11-29, 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[1] are the weekly Covid graphs, courtesy of the Covid Tracking Project. As usual on a holiday weekend, there's been a sharp downward jerk in the cases, tests, and deaths. Data-entry people apparently take holidays off sometimes.

The "hospitalizations" number, however, doesn't appear to have been obviously affected, probably because hospitals are mandated to report immediately by law and they don't shut down for any reason.

Right now, we've got about 92k covid patients in the hospital. If we start with today and work back seven days at a time, the numbers are 92k, 83k, 69k, 56k, 47k, 42k, 37k, 35k, and 30k. That's a rough eight weeks, but in the last week the number of people in the hospital has risen by 9,000, less than the 14,000 and 15,000 from the weeks before.

Maybe we're making some kind of dent in the spread. In any case, hospitalizations are still rising and it could be a rough winter. But the end is coming. The first vaccines are expected to be approved on December 10th, with several tens of millions of doses shipped before the end of the year.[2]

It should all be over relatively soon. Maybe by May.[3]

This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.

  1. (2021-6-2) Due, no doubt, to some kind of oversight, no Covid graphs were attached this post.↩︎
  2. (2021-6-2) By the end of 2020, according to Youyang Gu, about 2.8 million doses had been administered. The NYT relayed the federal government's claim that it had "delivered more than 12.4 million doses" (see here). While both numbers are well below "tens of millions", I still wish I had an easily available comprehensive accounting of the bizarre discrepancies in official stories between federal and local authorities during the early parts of the vaccine rollout. In any case, given the communication style of the administration that was still in power at the beginning of 2021, it seems unlikely that more than 12.4 million doses had been delivered.↩︎
  3. It may be a long-argued question as to when, if ever, the pandemic will be said to have been "ended". But by the end of May the levels of virus circulating in the US had fallen by more than 90% from their January peak.↩︎
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