This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-5-14, 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 Covid news was really, really good this week.
Short version
Cases and hospitalizations are dropping rapidly, and deaths are dropping as well. The country and the State of Ohio have taken major steps toward normalizing life this week. The one unfortunate thing is the rapid growth of a variant form of the virus called B.1.617 in the US, but even with that there is some reason to think that its impact should limited.
Long version
Over the last seven days, cases averaged 34,369 per day, down from 44,205 a week earlier, a drop of 22%. Hospital admissions averaged about 3,950 per day, down from about 4,550 per day the week before. Deaths are also moving in the right direction, averaging 599 over the last week, down from 644 the week before.
Governmental shifts
This week, for the first time, the CDC announced that it is no longer recommending that vaccinated people take precautions, for the most part. Vaccinated people are simply told they can resume their ordinary lives -- they don't need masks; they don't need to avoid crowds. Some would say the CDC is pretty late to the party here, but still, the shift tells us that the powers that be in the federal government are moving towards normalization in a big way.
The CDC's recommendation is not a legal thing -- it does not overrule any local mask or social distancing orders. Still, this move by the federal government makes local orders politically much harder to sustain. If your local government is telling vaccinated people that they must engage in various rituals like mask-wearing or avoiding close personal contact, to act as if they're still in significant danger, they are now doing so in spite of the federal government's clear statement that those various hygiene rituals are unnecessary for vaccinated people.
I would imagine that most state and local governments will fall quickly in line and liberate vaccinated people to go about their normal lives shortly. This leaves states with two options: either they can loosen restrictions for everyone, or they can only loosen restrictions for vaccinated people.
Given that about 60% of adults are now at least partially vaccinated, any loosening of mask mandates for vaccinated people is going to result in large numbers of people walking around without masks. So how do you keep the unvaccinated people masked? You could, in theory, have police going around demanding to see vaccine cards, but I don't think Americans will tolerate that at this late point in the pandemic.
The only other alternative is to simply give up on enforcement, and either officially lift restrictions for everyone, or just officially lift them for vaccinated people and stop enforcing them on the rest.
Here in Ohio, Governor Dewine announced -- a little bit ahead of the CDC, as he usually is -- that on June 2 all health orders, with the exception of some that apply to nursing homes and similar settings, will be lifted. He followed this with an announcement that as of June 26th the state of Ohio will resume its normal unemployment insurance system, and stop participating in the pandemic version.
A fly in the ointment
If there's one unencouraging thing going on at the moment, it's B.1.617. If you've watched the news, you've probably seen reports of India being hit pretty hard by coronavirus, after successfully controlling it for the most part for the past year.
Data presented by Trevor Bedford -- and other people have come to similar conclusions -- suggests that B.1.167 is increasing its prevalence in the US by about 62% weekly. If that's the case, and if he is correct that B.1.167 is already making up 1-2% of American cases (the CDC's data basically agrees), then if that pace were to continue this more virulent strain would make up the majority of US cases by mid-to-late July.
Given that the variant seems to be spreading very effectively in a US where 59% of US adults are already vaccinated and where vaccination has slowed, way, way down, it's not clear what happens at that point. There could be a rise in infections. And the IHME does predict a rise in infections starting about mid-July, although not a very steep one.
In any case, so far it does not look like B.1.617 has much in the way of ability to escape vaccination immunity, so any increase in cases would be concentrated among the unvaccinated. With vaccines widely available, to the point that 73 million more doses have been shipped than injected, everyone will have had plenty of time to work out whatever decisions they want to make about what sort of risks they are comfortable with.
Sources
For the basic day-to-day statistics on Covid, see the CDC Covid Data Tracker.
On B.1.617, there's been widespread coverage, but see Trevor Bedford, on Twitter, for a summary (here), and the CDC data on variant proportions (here).
For the IHME model, see here.
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