This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-3-12, 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.
The news has been mostly good this week, as far as the virus goes. Three main items: (1) deaths and hospitalizations keep falling, (2) cases are a little more complicated, (3) and the vaccination campaign is moving forward even faster.
(1) Deaths and hospitalizations
This week, for the first time since early December, the coronavirus is no longer the leading cause of death in the United States. Daily deaths averaged 1447 over the last seven days, down from 1734 the week before that. This is progress.
Daily hospital admissions average 4864 per day, down from 5332 the week before. This is also progress.
(2) Cases
Something weird happened this week with the rolling average number of cases. Here's the daily rolling average, starting March 4th and ending yesterday:
61,742
60,791
59,025
57,813
68,312
68,092
67,178
66,307
It went down every day except March 8th, when the average jumped by over 10,000 due to 124,266 cases added that day. Unless March 8th really just was a freak no good, horrible, very bad day, we're dealing here with some kind of lagging reporting, where a whole big batch of test results all finally made it into the CDC reports simultaneously. Do we say that cases went up over the last week, or that they went down every day but one? Either one is technically true.
Interestingly enough, Worldometers, a website that also tracks reports from all fifty states, had the rolling average just smoothly decline from 64,174 on March 4th to 56,599 at the end of the week.
So there's that. We'll have to watch and see if the cases keeping falling steadily, or if maybe we're at the beginning of a climb back up, perhaps caused by the spread of new variants or changes in how cautious people are feeling. And even if cases do start climbing up for the next couple of weeks, it's not clear that this would translate into an increase in deaths, as we are still preferentially vaccinating the oldest and sickest people. We could conceivably have rising cases and falling deaths at the same time if a rise in cases were concentrated among the younger and healthier.
(3) Vaccinations
In the last seven days, over sixteen million doses of vaccines were stuck into arms, the fastest pace seen yet. As of today, we've now got 66 million people vaccinated with at least one dose, and 101 million doses administered. And even that hasn't brought us closer to catching up with the incredible rate of vaccine deliveries: 133 million doses have been shipped, which means about 32 million doses have been shipped but not administered yet.
Given how many vaccines are available, we should expect to see states continue to increase their eligibility further. Someone I know got vaccinated yesterday, two people I know were today, Alaska became the first state this week to open eligibility to all residents, and my own state of Ohio decreased its age of eligibility to fifty.
Recently about 51% of adults told pollsters with Pew Research that they would either definitely get the vaccine or had already gotten it. Well, now 25.5% of adults have gotten their shots, which means that, according to that estimate, half the people who made up their minds to get a shot have gotten it now.
We've vaccinated about half of the people who definitely want the vaccine -- we'll probably vaccinate more than that, as some of the people currently on the fence will notice their friends and neighbors not falling over dead and give it a go themselves. But it's still an important half-way point.
And we've vaccinated 61.1% of those 65 years old and over--we have mostly vaccinated the group that has accounted for 80% of coronavirus deaths.
Last time I checked, the three vaccine manufacturers claimed they were on track to deliver 240 million doses by the end of March. They've already shipped 133, so that leaves 107 million to go in 19 days -- they'll have to meet a pace of about 5.6 million doses per day to make it. If they do make it, that's enough doses for all the people who definitely want the vaccine by the end of the month. If they don't speed up deliveries at all, that's still enough for all the people who definitely want it by some time in April.
Normal is coming, and it's closer every week.
Sources
For most statistics: the CDC
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.