This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-12-26, 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.
Daily deaths are still climbing: average 2700 per day and climbing, except for two unusually low days on Christmas and, to a lesser extent, Christmas Eve. Covid data is going to be wonky probably till some time early next year, because, just like Thanksgiving, a bunch of the data-collectors went home for the holiday. This will first cause a fake drop in cases, and then they'll start catching up, which will cause a fake spike in cases. Complicating things further, the holidays might cause a real jump in cases, which will get mixed into that crazy up-and-down. For the next two weeks, it'll be very hard to work out exactly where the data is pointing.
The one big exception is hospitalization data. Hospitals stay open and enter their data regardless of holidays, so that data doesn't do weird jumps around holidays. Hospitalizations are at about 119,000, up from 114,000 a week ago.
While hospitalizations are climbing, they lag a bit behind real cases, which have been roughly flat for the last couple of weeks. A week ago, this looked like we were probably at the worst of things, but turning the corner. We could look forward to more and more people becoming immune each week, and the coronavirus gently fading away.
However, things have gotten a little more complicated since then. A new strain of the coronavirus is running rampant in England, and at this point appears to be doubling in frequency about weekly in England despite the fact that England's lockdown measures are much more severe than anything we have going here. The new strain is beginning to turn up in more and more countries.
By December 20 (I'm cribbing from an excellently referenced Wikipedia article here, the new strain had appeared in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, and Italy. On the 23rd, it appeared in Singapore, Israel, and Northern Ireland. On the 24th, Germany and Switzerland. Yesterday, the Republic of Ireland and Japan. Today, France, Lebanon, Spain, and Sweden.
This is bad because of a simple math problem. If this strain doubles its numbers weekly even under strict lockdown conditions, then you get exponential growth by powers of two weekly, something like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ... This stuff can sneak up on you. If something doubles weekly, it multiplies one million-fold in twenty weeks, so if there are hundreds of cases in the US now, the potential for extreme growth is out there.
However, the important thing to remember here is that the new strain is still very much being studied, and it's not clear that it will in fact double every week in all environments. It might go slow; it might go faster. Time will tell.
In that case, we are in a three-way race. By the end of the summer, most Americans are going to be immune to coronavirus, one way or the other. Some will be immune due to vaccination, some will be immune due to catching Coronavirus Classic, and some will be immune due to catching Coronavirus UK Edition. It's all a question of how many of each.
Some Americans will miss out completely -- they won't get vaccines, and they won't get coronavirus. They'll just be fine. That's just how the numbers will run on any infectious disease. But most of us are going to get one or the other, and we've got to decide whether we prefer a new vaccine or a new virus in our system.
Now, some people will say that the vaccine hasn't been fully tested yet. And while it has been extensively testing, it's true that there's always some things that haven't been tested yet. For example, we have zero examples of people who have taken the vaccine years ago, which means we have no examples of the vaccine's very long-term effects. However, we also have no examples of people who had covid years ago, so we have to weigh that in as well.
When I think about these things, I try to compare coronavirus to the worst vaccine disasters in history. Two vaccine disasters come up most often -- there's the Cutter Incident, where a polio vaccine manufacturer messed up and just gave people polio instead of polio vaccine. That killed ten people. And then there's the 1976 swine flu vaccine, which 45 million people received, resulting in 53 deaths. Those are the worst vaccine blunders in American history.
Those levels of deaths from the worst vaccine safety issues in US history -- 10 and 53 -- should be compared with the number of people dying from the coronavirus, which as of the latest count is above 300,000 in the United States. It's true that both viruses and vaccines can be dangerous, in the same way that both nuclear bombs and slippery shower stalls are hazards. But they're not in the same league. Thinking they're in the same league is just a simple failure to do math.
Until pretty recently, the US was talking about having 20 million people vaccinated by the end of the year. Right now, we've got six days left in the year, and Bloomberg is reporting that just 1.2 million people have been vaccinated so far.
So the vaccination timetable, at least for the moment, seems to have slowed down, and we're now seeing the transmission of the virus speed up enormously in England, along with the new strain appearing in a growing number of countries.
This will almost certainly be mostly over this year, but we could be in for a wild ride till then.
The graphs are attached.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The four graphs are from the Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC-BY-4.0 license.