This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-1-23, 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.
Things are somewhat better this week.
For weeks, the spread of new cases has been leveling off, and then starting to decline. Sooner or later, a slowing of new Covid cases has to lead to a decline in deaths, and it looks like we are starting to see the first bits of that.
This week, the United States averaged about 3200 deaths per day, down a little bit from about 3400 deaths per day the week before. With the number of new cases starting to decline sharply around January 10th, we should continue to see deaths fall, at least for a while.
Over the last seven days, we've seen about 180,000 new cases of the virus identified by tests each day, down from about 235,000 cases the week before. It's a pretty steep decline we've been in, of about 20% per week, since the peak on January 10th.
Every wave of Covid follows a similar pattern -- a similar pattern to all infectious disease outbreaks -- where the cases increase rapidly for a while, then cases keep growing but more slowly, then a peak is hit, and then we head back down. This round, cases went up quickly in October and November, went up a bit more slowly in December, and now have peaked and are heading downhill in January.
What made it head back down? Probably a number of things. For one thing, we're past the holidays, so people are getting together a bit less. We've also had a lot of people get infected, and the immunity the survivors get makes it harder for the virus to spread going forward. And finally, as the hospitals fill up and deaths rise, people get more cautious. All these things combined bring the cases and deaths back down, and this time we have the additional advantage that vaccines are starting to be implemented too.
In the past, we've been locked into an up-and-down cycle. When cases go up, we tighten up our behavior (voluntarily and involuntarily through legal changes), and then cases go back down. As cases go back down, we loosen up our behavior because things are safer, and then cases go back up. We are now beginning to escape this yo-yo cycle.
The number of shots that go into arms each week, despite all the drama and issues with the vaccine rollout, has continued steadily rising since vaccines started being released about five weeks ago. This week, we averaged about 980,000 shots per day, up from about 840,000 the week before.
And we have the vaccines already to pick up the pace quite a bit. 40 million shots have been shipped, and 20 million shots have gone into arms, which means we have an excess of 20 million shots waiting as soon as we can figure out how to use them. About 6% of US adults have now been partially vaccinated.
The number of people in the hospital for Covid has been decreasing since January 6th, when we hit a high of about 132,000 people hospitalized. That number is now standing at about 116,000. That's not some kind of final victory over the virus yet, but it's two to three weeks of solid movement in the right direction.
Youyang Gu estimates that about 94 million Americans, or 28% of the population, are now immune to the virus, mostly from infection, but an increasing number from vaccination as well. About 3-4 million people continue to catch the virus each week, and about 7 million per week are getting shots (mostly first doses, but some second doses now too). Adding those together, and accounting for the double doses and some overlap, Gu estimates that going forward that 28% should increase by 2% each week till May, by which point there will be far fewer cases of coronavirus than there are now.
In other words, a lot of things are looking really good for our upcoming outlook. In the past, whenever we've got the virus under a bit better control, that's still left an enormous number of people who aren't immune, which leaves us more or less waiting for the next outbreak. Now, the number of people immune should keep climbing steadily with or without virus spread thanks to vaccination. We are heading for the exits on this thing.
There are two big unknowns left at this point. One is the continued spread of the UK strain of coronavirus in the US. Right now, it looks like something like 0.7% of US cases are UK coronavirus, and UK coronavirus is still on track to make up the majority of US cases by some time in March. However, by that point, we're likely to already have 40-50% of the population immune, and even now the number of UK coronavirus cases is falling in the UK itself. So even if it does cause a temporary jump in cases, we do know now that the UK coronavirus, while it's a problem, is not invincible.
The other big unknown is whether the South African strain of the coronavirus, or something else like it, will be able to reinfect some of the people in the US who are already immune to Covid-Classic. The research so far on this is in its early stages, but so far it looks like the vaccines and previous coronavirus infections will be at least somewhat effective at stopping the South African variant. We'll have to stay tuned on this one. The South African variant doesn't seem to be quite as contagious as the UK strain, so it'll be an issue where we have a bit more time to learn about it before it shows up in large numbers, if it even shows up here in large numbers at all.
So, to sum it all up, the numbers are looking like everything is moving in the right direction, we've probably got at least five weeks of things improving in front of us, vaccines are becoming increasingly available, the UK strain might be a problem but it will also wind up being defeated by the usual means, and we have a bit more time to figure out the South African strain before it potentially becomes an issue.
I'm very happy with what I've seen so far this week, and I look forward to things continuing to get better. The excellent and very encouraging graphs are attached.
The graphs from Bloomberg and the Covid Tracking Project are clearly labelled; the graph of vaccinations marked "CDC" is from Youyang Gu. I will be away from access to Facebook for about two days here starting about now, so if somebody has a question or comment and I don't respond, I should be able to get to that next week.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The graphs are not mine.