This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-2-19, 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.
Time for the weekly Covid numbers. Three main ideas: (1) the numbers are continuing to improve, except (2) the British variant is closer to taking over, and (3) the vaccination stage of things is further along than it might seem.
Numbers improving
According to Worldometers, the seven-day rolling average of deaths stands at 1998, down from 2670 a week ago. People who die usually spend time in the hospital first, so if we want to know where the death rate is going in the future, we want to look at the current trend in hospitalizations. And that's good news too: 59,882 people in the hospital with Covid, down from 71,497 a week ago. And if you want to know what will happen with hospitalizations in the future, the thing you want to watch is how many people are being infected now. Known cases per day are at about 70,000 over the last week, down from about 100,000 the week before.
So it's nice big drops all the way around here, which means that deaths should continue falling for the next three weeks at least. If you want to peer further into the future, that's gets a little murkier, but there's two big things to watch: the British variant and the progress with vaccinations. This gets harder to speak about for sure, but here's what we know.
British COVID
The British variant of coronavirus continues to be more and more common in the US. The numbers published by the Helix Research team suggest that 10-15% of US infections right now are of the British strain, which means, given how fast it spreads, that some time in March, maybe around March 10th, we are likely to see most cases in the US being the British cases.
What exactly this will turn out to mean is still unclear. On the one hand, the British strain does spread better, and likely has a somewhat worse death rate. On the other hand, the countries where the British strain has gotten furthest -- the UK, several European countries, and Israel -- appear to still have falling rates of Covid. So what we would hope is that the same will happen here, and that the increased transmissibility won't ruin things for us.
Vaccines
The US vaccine rollout has had its difficulties. Still, about 43 million people have received their first dose of vaccine, and that number is growing by just under a million per day.
To get a grasp on what that means, consider this. There are about 262 million Americans 16 years old or older. Those are the people who are eligible for vaccination: the 60-some million younger people can't get the shots, and make up only a tiny slice of the people dying. Out of those 262 million, maybe half are eager to get the vaccine (something like 30% say they are interested in the vaccine but want to wait and see a bit first, and about 20% say they don't want it).
So that's something like 131 million people eager to get the vaccine. To get shots into the arms of the majority of people eager to get the vaccine would take 66 million shots, give or take a few million. At the pace things are going, that means we're about three weeks away from 66 million people getting their first shot.
Most knowledgeable sources believe that the pace of vaccine manufacture will increase over the next few months, so we'll be looking at more like two million people getting their first dose each day fairly soon. Youyang Gu, who has probably a better track record than anyone else at guessing these kinds of things, estimates that starting in late April the number of people getting the vaccine each day will start to drop -- not because of manufacturing problems, but because most of the people gung-ho to get their shots will have already got them by then, leaving the people who want shots but weren't in any hurry to get them to get the rest of the shots.
That peak in vaccination, according to Gu, is about eight weeks away. Very soon we'll find ourselves in a world where most of the people who want shots have no trouble getting them.
After that, it will probably be very difficult for local governments to maintain any kind of strict coronavirus controls. The people worried about the virus will have had their shots, most people will be immune either from shots or from having had the virus. The remaining people without immunity will mostly be people who aren't concerned about the virus, or people who are very concerned about the vaccine who choose to take their chances with the virus.
Covid, at that point, will be a voluntary disease in almost all cases -- and that outcome looks to be about twelve weeks away. At that point, there will still be some cases of coronavirus. But it's very hard to imagine that we'll be shutting down large parts of normal life for very long just to protect people who don't want to get vaccinated.
Normality looks like it's not too far off.
Sources
Basic statistics: Covid Tracking Project
More basic statistics: Worldometers.
Vaccine statistics: Bloomberg.
Youyang Gu's "path to herd immunity", and other estimates.
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