This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-5-22, 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.
It's been an excellent week in covid news. Cases are averaging about 25,000 per day, down from about 32,000 the week before. New hospital admissions have averaged about 3,290 per day, down from about 3,880 the week before. And deaths are averaged 504 per day, down from 533 the week before. All the main indicators are moving in the right direction.
Everything, at least here in Milford, Ohio, is significantly more opened this week than the week before. At Walmart, about half of the people are maskless now, and the signs requiring masks are coming off shops and restaurants. This is not to say that life is returning to normal. It may look like it right this moment, but over the next week billions of teenaged bugs are going to emerge from the ground and make everything extremely abnormal for the next six to eight weeks.
Only then, maybe, will life return to something approaching normalcy.
On the vaccine front, the slowdown in vaccinations has stopped, and vaccination numbers are, for the moment, no longer dropping. Approximately 700,000 people per day -- that's 5 million per week -- are receiving their first dose of vaccine at this point. Even if that continues for just a few weeks, that could make a significant dent in the remaining infectable population. 5 million per week is 20 million or so per month, in a country that still has just about 100 million unvaccinated adults and 20 million unvaccinated 12-17-year-olds.
B.1.617, the family of variants first found in India, continue to spread in the US, and the latest numbers show about 2% of genetically sequenced virus samples in the US coming from B.1.617. That's a very rough number at this point, due to various sampling biases that could push the number found above or below the real proportion. But in any case, B.1.617 continues to show up in more and more US cases, and appears to be more infectious than B.1.1.7, the currently dominant strain. It remains to be seen exactly how that turns out, but it doesn't seem to be infecting vaccinated individuals so far.
Sources
For basic Covid statistics (cases, deaths, hospitalizations, vaccinations) see the CDC Covid Data Tracker.
For B.1.617, which is almost entirely represented in the US by substrain B.1.617.2, see Outbreak.Info.
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