This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-12-12, 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.
Bad news first.
New cases (as measured by tests) are averaging over 200,000 per day and rising, while hospitalizations are continuing to rise as well, going from about 101,000 to 108,000 over the last week. We're averaging about 2300 deaths per day and rising -- this looks like it will probably reach around 3000 or more in the next three weeks.
Now the good news.
Youyang Gu, perhaps the most accurate person out there at predicting the trend of coronavirus so far -- he's a statistical modeler -- thinks that at some time in the last two weeks we hit a peak of real new daily infections, at around 600,000 per day. Right now, he thinks we're at about 540,000 per day, which will drop to 500,000 by December 20th, 400,000 by January 7th, 300,000 by February 3rd, 200,000 by April 4th, 100,000 by April 20th, and 50,000 by May 15th.
In other words, if Gu is right, we have recently started climbing back down the mountain, and won't stop until this is all behind us. Whether or not Gu is right about the timing, something like that seems inevitable fairly soon.
Every person who gets infected either dies or becomes immune, with very few exceptions. They don't get sick again. Almost everyone who is vaccinated doesn't get sick. As more and more Americans are immune, either through vaccination or the hard way, it leaves a harder and harder environment for the virus to spread in.
We have a very high rate of new illnesses right now, and it looks like a huge number of vaccines are coming. Between the two of those, we should have some kind of new good news every week. This week, the first vaccine was approved in the US.
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