This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-2-12, 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 better this week, except for the continued spread of the British variant. The big three indicators: cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, are all dropping nicely at a pace of about 2-3% daily. There's about 72,000 in the hospital as opposed to about 89,000 a week ago, daily cases are averaging about 97,000 as opposed to 131,000 a week ago, and daily deaths are averaging about 2760 compared to 3121 a week ago.
The virus is on the run. This should not be entirely shocking -- of the much less harmful coronaviruses that have been circulating among humans for a long time, most of them peak in December and then drop in January. This is somewhat like what we're seeing.
On top of the normal fading of coronavirus transmission that tends to kick in around New Year's, we're also vaccinating at a faster and faster pace. This week we averaged about 1.7 million doses administered daily, up from 1.3 million the week before. We've just crossed the line of 50 million doses administered, and several knowledgeable people, including former FDA director Scott Gottlieb, are saying that we're going to have 250 million doses shipped by the end of March. That's enough to vaccinate most of the adults in the country, and all in 6-7 weeks. If they are right about that, then we're looking at an average of 3-4 million doses per day through the end of March -- things are going to get much faster on the vaccine side of things very quickly.
One might almost think that the whole coronavirus pandemic will be basically wrapped up for the United States by the end of March, with nothing but a bit of mopping up afterward. The reason to doubt that picture is something else that's supposed to happen by the end of March -- the takeover of the American pandemic by the British variant. Right now, the surveillance data from the Helix Research Team suggests that about 5% of cases in the US are of the British variant right now.
Based on how much faster the British variant spreads than regular coronavirus, most experts think that at some point in March most coronavirus cases will be British, and given the higher transmissibility (spreadiness) of this variant, some knowledgeable folks like Youyang Gu and the IHME modelers think it may cause a short and relatively small jump in cases before cases start going down again.
But hospitalizations, cases, and deaths are all falling steadily, while ever-larger numbers of peole are getting vaccinated. Hopefully the collapse of the coronavirus will just steamroll right over the British variant. In any case, we should have a much better idea in about six weeks, at which point we'll know whether we hit that incredible projection of 250 million doses, and we'll be in a position to see if the new variant shifts anything.
The graphs below were taken from the Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC BY 4.0.
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The image containing four graphs is by the Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC BY 4.0.