This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-12-19, 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.
Coronavirus deaths keep rising, with an average of over 2500 per day right now. The IHME model thinks it'll peak around 3700 per day in early January. We will see.
Now the good news.
Deaths lag about three weeks behind actual infections, so if we're going to see a peak in deaths about three weeks from now, that means we're already at the worst point now for infections. This also agrees with the IHME's model, which thinks about 700,000 people are getting the virus per day now, and that it will fall pretty steadily from here on out.
Youyang Gu, who is smarter than the already impressive IHME folks, but could still be wrong, thinks we actually hit peak infections back around Thanksgiving, with about 630,000 infections per day, and that we're now at about 512,000 and falling.
If you don't like guesses and want to look instead at the number of positive test results -- which don't account for the people with the virus who aren't being tested -- then we're at about 220,000 infections per day, with the number pretty flat over the last week, for the first time since, goodness, late summer.
So there's a number of different sources that seem to think we're about at the peak of it and things may well be getting better soonish.
Here's another bit of good news. A week ago, we'd just had the first vaccine approved. On Monday, it started shipping to the states. 2.9 million doses shipped, and several million are waiting on the federal government to decide where they should be shipped out to. And that's just the Pfizer vaccine. On Friday, the federal government approved the Moderna vaccine, which has been patiently waiting for eleven months for approval, ever since Moderna whipped it out in an astounding two days of work.
That's an interesting little bit of information I'm chewing over. On January 11th, the Chinese government released the genetic sequence of coronavirus and announced the first death. Moderna got to work, and had a vaccine produced on January 13th. Since January 13th, there's been 1.7 million global deaths and 300,000 deaths in the US.
Why didn't the federal government allow Moderna to begin immediately producing the vaccine and let any doctor who thought it was a good idea to start prescribing it? Because they wanted to make sure it was safe first.
What happens if a vaccine isn't safe? The two worst vaccine-safety incidents I've read about are the Cutter Incident, where a vaccine manufacturer wound up giving live polio virus to children instead of a vaccine, killing ten people, and the 1976 swine flu fiasco. With the swine flu case, the federal government rushed out a vaccine to 45 million people, resulting in 53 deaths.
So the government has to weigh the risk from allowing a vaccine -- possible side effects -- against the risk of not allowing a vaccine -- people dying of the disease it could cure. Interestingly, the point where the federal government decided to release the Moderna vaccine was only after 300,000 Americans had died.
Is holding back a vaccine while 300,000 Americans die an appropriate level of caution to avoid something like the Cutter incident from happening again? I'm not sure what all went into that decision, so I don't know.
But since we've tried not having vaccines for a long time, and that hasn't gone very well, I'm glad we're now going to try having them.
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