This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-5-7, 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.
I didn't run the numbers last weekend on the coronavirus, being busy going back to semi-normal life. Over the course of the pandemic, I've been more careful than some people and less careful than others, but everyone, at their various paces, seems to me moving toward normality at some rate this year.
The short version
The numbers look very good this week for the United States. In fact, in some ways the numbers look better than at any point in the pandemic so far. The virus is receding, vaccines are easily available to all takers, and people of all sorts are feeling more confident about getting back to normal life.
The long version
The big headline here -- not that it's making a lot of whole headlines, because bad news does better everywhere -- is that the positivity rate on people getting tested is lower than it's ever been. Just 3.5% of people taking tests are coming back positive right now, lower than the 4% we reached at the end of the big round of lockdowns, and less than the 4.1% we reached during that nice little time in October when it looked like the virus was going away, before the big winter surge.
Alongside the drop in test positivity rates, there's also -- of course -- a decline in the number of people testing positive. The seven-day moving average of cases is at about 44,000, compared to about 52,000 a week ago. Hospitals admitted an average of 4,528 new coronavirus patients per day nationwide, down from 4,978 the week before.
The one thing that hasn't improved a whole lot over the last month is the number of deaths. Right now we're at 645 per day (seven-day rolling average), while a month ago we were at 657 per day. The number has bounced around a little over the last month, but it's stayed in the 600's or low 700's the whole time. The interesting thing isn't so much that deaths have been steady -- it's that they haven't risen.
Throughout the pandemic, deaths have usually done whatever cases have done, just three weeks later. If cases start rising, falling, or plateauing, about three weeks later deaths start rising, falling, or plateauing.
In this case, from mid-March to mid-April, cases rose steadily. So we would expect, from around April 6th to May 6th, that deaths would rise steadily, but they didn't. And that's probably because a greater and greater proportion of the people with Covid are younger and younger now, what with over 80% of the people over 65 having their shots.
We are starting to decouple cases from deaths, and that's a beautiful thing. The vaccination drive is wrapping up, at least for adults. The latest weekly figures show 825,000 people per day getting their first shot, down from 1,096,000 the week before. The decline is purely the natural result of most of the people who want shots already getting them. There's no vaccine shortage -- we've shipped out 73 million doses that nobody's used yet.
We're not totally done vaccinating -- we're still giving 5-6 million adults their first shot each week, and 12-15 year-olds will probably be approved shortly for Pfizer, which will add several million more shots.
But 57% of adults have gotten at least one dose, and after reading a very large amount of polling done by a lot of companies on people's feelings about the vaccines, I think we could sum it up this way. Everyone -- with very few exceptions -- who was eager to get a shot has gotten one. Maybe 20%, maybe 30%, of adults simply aren't going to get a shot. Maybe 10% of adults would like to get one, but are sort of waiting to get around to it. They're just not in enough of a hurry to get an appointment. And maybe 10 or 20% are still making up their minds. Those numbers are all fuzzy, vary from poll to poll, and overlap because there's a whole bunch of different feelings in between the poeple who really wanted vaccines and the people who definitely didn't want them.
But in any case, the main vaccine drive is over, and from here on out there'll still be vaccinations, but on a smaller and slower scale. Nobody is cooped up indoors just waiting for some shots so they can go out. The remaining unvaccinated people are mostly comfortable with lifting the remaining regulations and going back to normal life.
The number of people dying from the coronavirus -- about 600-700 per day -- is now similar to the number of people who were dying during the 2017-2018 flu season, and all the statistics we have point to that number going down over the next month. And flu doesn't even have highly effective vaccines, so for those who have been vaccinated, the average adult is considerably safer now than they were in the 2017-2018 flu season.
And people are noticing the improvement. At this point, the percentage of Americans worried about catching the virus is dropping, among men and women, among young and old, among white and non-white Americans, among people of both and no political party.
When you break down the worries by vaccination status, you see something interesting (these are Gallup numbers). 21% of the fully vaccinated, 37% of the partially vaccinated, and 49% of those who aren't yet but still plan to get vaccinated are worried about catching the virus -- and all three numbers have dropped significantly. The only group with no change is the group that plans not to get vaccinated, where only 19% are worried about catching the virus.
In the same way, though I won't repeat all the numbers, Gallup reports that people in all kinds of situations are resuming normal life more and more. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is now recommending that the CDC start considering removing indoor mask recommendations.
Bit by bit, you can see the normal world being put back together.
Sources
For the overall test positivity rate, Johns Hopkins University.
For cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, the CDC Covid Data Tracker.
For the length of flu season, CDC.
For the number of deaths in the 2017-18 flu season, CDC.
For people's impressions of the pandemic and level of worry, Gallup.
On people getting back to more normal behaviors, Gallup.
On Scott Gottlieb and indoor mask mandates, Marketwatch.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.