This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-1-9, 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 are continuing to rise, and are now averaging over 3,000 a day. Cases are also rising, at about 250,000 a day. Vaccinations are running a lot slower than originally advertized.
On the other hand, this kind of thing as a natural built-in time limit. Practically nobody gets the disease twice (so far), so each infection is one less person who can get the disease in the future. Youyang Gu, who if generally acknowledged to have a strong grasp on this kind of thing, thinks about 25% of Americans are currently immune due to already having had the virus. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, is working with similar numbers.
That means about 75% percent of Americans are still capable of catching the disease. All in all, probably about 600,000 people a day are achieving immunity by catching it, which means a little over 1% of the country each week. Meanwhile, despite the headlines about slow vaccine rollout -- which are pretty much true -- the number of people vaccinated each day is still climbing. About 7 million Americans have been vaccinated, and about 400,000 per day are getting the jab now. That's over 1% of the country's adults each week, and that number is set to rise to more like 3% over the next couple of months.
Once the 75% susceptible is down to maybe 20-40%, then the disease can't spread widely. It might stop spreading widely well before that.
We still have the big wild card of the UK strain coming up. Rough math indicates it might become a big problem around March at the rate its going, but there's too many variables and too little information to say confidently so far. Both the UK strain and the South African strain appear to be preventable by the same vaccines as regular coronavirus, so whatever happens over the next few months, they should still wind up rare in the US by the time this finishes playing out in the coming months.
Here in Ohio, we're expecting that enough shots to vaccinate all nursing home residents and health workers should be out by about next week. On January 19th, eligibility opens for everyone over 80, whether or not they're hospitalized. Then the plan is to reduce the eligibility age by five years every week: 75, 70, 65, and so on, until everyone is allowed to get it.
That will produce a nice count-down effect. And, no matter what happens over the next few months, one way or another we are counting down to the end. Vaccines will get steadily more and more available. If we contain the virus well in the meantime and few people get infected, we've won. If the virus continues to spread out of control and huge numbers of people get infected, we've lost, but the resulting immunity will end the outbreak anyhow.
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.