This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-2-6, 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.
There are about 86,000 people in the United States hospitalized with coronavirus, down from 101,000 a week ago, 116,000 a week before that, down from 127,000 and 132,000.
Total cases are also dropping. Over the last week we've averaged 124,000 new cases daily, down from 160,000 the week before, down from 185,000, down from 236,000 and 246,000.
We averaged 3104 deaths per day this week, down from 3332 last week. We haven't seen yet improvement on deaths the way we have on cases and hospitalizations, but movement on deaths tends to follow hospitalizations and cases but just a few weeks behind.
When it comes to vaccinations, we've now had 38.5 million doses put in arms, with a pace staying more or less steady the past two weeks of about 1.3 million doses per day. We've distributed about 59 million doses of vaccine, so we continue to have about 20 million more doses than we've used.
Several new vaccines are potentially coming down the pike: Johnson and Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca. Johnson and Johnson will probably get approved in the next few weeks, and they expect to add several million a week to our nation's supply of vaccines. All in all, it's looking likely that we should mostly be wrapped up vaccinating the adults who want it by some time in May.
From now till the end of May is about fifteen weeks. We're not that far from wrapping up vaccination season. What happens between now and then?
It's a race at this point between rising population immunity and the UK version of the virus. About 31% of people in the United States are immune to the virus right now, according to Gu's estimate, and that number will be rising steadily from now until the virus is 95% less than now around the beginning of June. So the population becoming more and more immune should slow down and finally end virus transmission.
But the UK strain is much better at spreading than the older strains, and so that pushes in the opposite direction. I don't know what will happen, but I think it's worth noticing that both Youyang Gu and the IHME think we'll see several weeks of gently rising infections around March. The IHME thinks deaths will continue to fall, even with rising infections, because we've prioritized old people in our vaccinations. So when will it all be over? If Youyang Gu's numbers are about right, the virus is going to continue to hang around, without too much growth or decline, through the next eleven weeks of February, March, and April, with about 200,000 to 300,000 eople catching the virus every day throughout that period. Then, during the four weeks of May, it drops from about 200,000 at the beginning to about 35,000 at the end. Then June sees a drop from 35,000 to about 5,000, and at that point the virus no longer practically exists for the great majority of Americans.
But that's just Youyang Gu's numbers. We'll have to see how it all actually plays out over the next twenty weeks or so.
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.