This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-4-16, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, along with some basic copy-editing, may have occurred in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
It's hard to say whether things got better this week with the coronavirus situation, because there really isn't one coronavirus situation in the country -- there's two. Among the vaccinated, the pandemic is more or less over -- a recent count found 74 deaths so far among 77 million fully vaccinated people. Not 74 deaths per day, but 74 deaths total. Among the unvaccinated, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are currently rising, though at a fairly slow pace. Let's run the numbers
(1) The things getting worse
The seven-day rolling average of cases detected stands at 69,557, up from 64,339 a week ago. New hospital admissions are averaging 5507 per day, up from 5269 the week before. Deaths are averaging 712 per day, up from 642 the week before.
(2) The things getting better
126 million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine so far, including 48.3% of the adult population and 80.0% of people 65 and up. We're averaging 3.35 million injections per day over the last week, up from 3.03 million the week before, so the vaccine rollout is still gathering speed -- we're not running out of people willing to get the shots yet.
About 1.8 million people are receiving their first dose every day, which means that about 12.5 million adults per week are entering the vaccinated pool -- about 5% of the country's adults. Another way to put that is that nearly 10% of the country's unvaccinated adults are getting vaccinated each week. This is a fast pace of change, and should result in the country being much more protected from the virus a few weeks from now than it is currently.
The increase in vaccinated adults will also continue to provide increasing protection for unvaccinated adults as well, by reducing the number of people who can spread the disease to them in the first place. If this protection gets strong enough, then it becomes what people call "herd immunity" -- a situation where the number of people still capable of catching and transmitting the virus is low enough, and those people are scattered enough throughout the population, that the disease can't spread effectively.
In an ironic twist on things, even the surge in cases we are experiencing right now may speed up the return of normal life, as strange as that sounds. While about 12.5 million people's bodies are producing antibodies due to encountering the vaccine for the first time each week, about a million people, give or take, are undergoing a similar process due to actually catching the virus. While catching the virus is not the safest way to gain immunity, it still does the job, and still moves the country closer to the finish line.
Where is the finish line? If 122 million people have been vaccinated, and about 110 million have caught the virus (a guess), then adding those numbers together gives perhaps 180 million people immune to the virus (also a guess, after accounting for the fact that some people who got the virus got vaccinated after). If it takes 60 to 90 percent of the population being immune to the virus to reach herd immunity, that comes to about 200 to 300 million people needing to be immune to reach herd immunity. If we're marching toward that number at about 13 million people per week, then at the current rate we're likely 2 to 8 weeks from herd immunity, although there's all sorts of guesses involved in a calculation like that.
Some experts think we likely won't reach herd immunity -- the number of people willing to get vaccinated won't be high enough, and the disease will just continue to circulate, though at lower levels than right now, among the remaining unvaccinated population forever. This is also possible, but a world where most people are protected and some people decide to take their chances is still a much more normal world than the world we've spent most of the last year in.
Once everyone who wants a shot has had a shot, the vaccinated people will want to go back to their ordinary lives, and most of the unvaccinated, who aren't quite as concerned about the virus, will also want to go back to their ordinary lives, even if the virus is still circulating. You can see the beginnings of this sort of thing playing out in Michigan, where despite a strong recent increase in coronavirus cases, the governor, who previously was known for strong anti-virus measures, is unwilling to tighten restrictions again. Just the fact that people who want the vaccine can get it changes the situation, even if they don't get it. It becomes less like a hurricane, where everyone feels the need to take drastic community-wide action, and more like a killer like smoking, where we mostly let people make their own decisions.
So, this week, the disease spread a bit further than the week before, but the overall situation is still moving toward a much safer, much more normal world.
Sources
For basic statistics: CDC Covid Data Tracker.
For the Covid death rate among vaccinated people: Mercury News
For just one estimate of how many Americans have had the virus, see Youyang Gu. Others have reached similar numbers.
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