This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-1-30, 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.
Deaths are still high, but we're making quite a bit of progress.
This week we averaged about 3300 Covid deaths per day, up from 3200 last week, and we had 3400 the week before. In other words, we're still on top of this high plateau. But we've got to start heading downwards because of what's been happening to hospitalizations and cases.
In the first seven days of this year, the number of people in the hospital for Covid increased by about 6,000. The next week it decreased by 5,000, the week after that by 11,000, and finally last week by 15,000. So through January, not only have things started getting better, but they've got better at a pace that's increasing each week. We're down from a high of 132,000 patients to 101,000 patients. It's serious progress.
The number of cases per day has also been dropping. The seven-day rolling average is down from about 255,000 on January 11th to 160,000 as of yesterday.
The vaccines are rolling out. Despite some very real problems with the rollouts, the trend all through January has been for more and more shots to be administered day by day. In the last seven days, just over nine million doses were administered, about seven of those being first shots and two being second shots. We've now injected 29 million shots, and we're still shipping out new shots faster than the states can put them into people's arms. Of the 49 million shots shipped, about 20 million still haven't been injected, so we're not on the edge of running out by any means.
The big remaining question in front of us is the UK strain of the coronavirus, which is still, according to all the major authorities I've read, on track to take over as our main form of Covid by some time in March. The bad news is that there's now some reason to believe it might be about 30-40% more deadly than old-fashioned Covid. The good news is that, according to the CDC, IHME, and Youyang Gu, it doesn't look like it should be able to cause cases to spike. We're getting a better handle on its capabilities week by week, and we have a better understanding now of how many people will be immune by March.
What it looks like, according to the Gu, the CDC, and IHME, is that Covid cases should continue to fall steadily throughout February, fall very slowly throughout March, and then start falling faster again as the new strain is overwhelmed by the increase in vaccinations. Nothing is over till its over, but this seems like optimistic news compared to what could have happened if the variant was more uncontrollable. And the UK strain is in clear decline right now in the UK, which turned the tide by locking down, and Israel, by far the most effective country in the world at vaccinating its citizens. There is more than one way to skin this cat.
The next big variant of concern, the South African strain, so far has not spread explosively outside of its home country the way the UK strain has. And preliminary data from vaccine manufacturers looks fairly optimistic. Existing vaccines seem to work pretty well against it, even if not quite as well as they do against regular or UK Covid.
All in all, things seem to be moving in the right direction. It looks like we are mostly likely at the top of the deaths we should get from this virus in the US, and that things will improve from here.
According to Youyang Gu's estimates -- and the CDC has moved its estimates much closer to Gu recently -- about 29% of the population is now immune to Covid, mostly from catching the virus, but with an increasing minority from vaccines. Gu is projecting that this should increase with roughly 2% of Americans added to the immune side each week from now till June, by which point Covid deaths will be down to about 3% of their peak and still falling.
The virus may still have surprises in store for us, but from where things stand now, the next few months look like we should see continuous improvement until the virus disappears from daily life.
The graph with CDC data on vaccination progress is from Youyang Gu, while the Bloomberg one is from, well, Bloomberg; the rest comes from the Covid Tracking Project.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The graphs are not mine.