This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-1-16, 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.
Deaths have continued rising, with about 3400 deaths per day of Covid over the last week, up from about 3200 the week before. We're continuing to struggle at vaccinating. The UK strain of Covid is coming. While two weeks ago I was scratching out some math saying it could become the dominant US strain in March, and now the CDC says it will most likely become the dominant US strain in March. This is bad because the UK strain spreads a lot faster than the old coronavirus. It doesn't seem to be any worse for a person who catches it, and the vaccines seem to work on it, but it could result in more people catching the virus.
Still, there are reasons for optimism: plenty of good news.
For the first time since the winter wave of the virus started, we are seeing the number of people in the hospital fall. It hit a high of about 132,000 on January 6th, and has gently declined since to about 127,000 yesterday. That's movement in the right direction, and it means deaths can't keep rising for too much longer.
Although we're struggling to get shots in arms, we are getting better at it. We gave about 844,000 shots per day over the last week on average, up from 509,000 the week before, up from 283,000 the week before. In terms of totals, over 5% of adults in the US have now got their shots, and that's with just 13 million shots given out of the 31 million shots distributed. And sooner or later we'll figure out how to actually give all the shot we're shipping. West Virginia's doing a good job of it, and so everyone else can too. Despite the need for keeping them cold, it's overall not that hi-tech an issue.
It's still not entirely clear what kind of impact the UK strain of coronavirus will have. On the one hand, we've struggled to contain just regular coronavirus, and so something about 75% more transmissible could in theory infect an enormous number of people. On the other hand, we've got a bit of a head start on it.
27% of the population (Youyang Gu's estimate) is already immune, mostly due to infection, while by mid-March we're likely looking at a population 45% immune. That's a harder situation for a virus to spread in. And then you've got warmer weather kicking, likely over ten million vaccinations a week, and maybe we'll get lucky.
In any case, it looks like we're heading toward the fabled herd immunity some time around June, and widespread spread of the virus might be mostly gone even before that.
And if we do a good job of vaccinating the old, large numbers of deaths could be over even before that. 31 million doses have shipped, and it would only take 50 million to give everyone over 65 their first dose.
So there's no guarantees for the future, but vaccinations are escalating, hospitalizations are down, and everything looks like it's in the process of moving toward the right direction. Except that UK strain. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The graphs are from the Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC-BY-4.0 license.