This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-6-30, 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.
Today is eighteen months, to the day, from when the coronavirus first appeared in the news. On December 31st, it was a very small news story about some unexplained flu cases in Wuhan. Then it became the worst pandemic in a century, very quickly. Today, in the United States, Covid has now receded to where, like lung cancer or flu, it is a very real health threat, but not a crisis. This is true even though we will likely see a rise in cases over the next few weeks, as the new Delta Variant is surpassing 50% of US cases right about now.
So I thought I might take one long-winded post to review what happened, and to make the case for why there's no need to anxiously scan the news for coronavirus details going forward.
Some time in October or November 2019, a few people in or near Wuhan, China, became sick with a flu-like illness much more severe than a common flu, but much less severe than SARS. This virus originated through some sort of human-to-animal spread, either inside or outside of a laboratory. The precise origin isn't clear at this point. If I were a bettor, I would bet that this thing got loose from a lab, but I'm not confident about that. But just for reference, SARS, a virus much more deadly than Covid, has escaped from a single Chinese lab four times, so it would not be the least bit strange for a less deadly virus to get loose.
In any case, in a "fresh" environment, where no one is immune, and no one is trying to avoid Covid, the average infected person infects about three other people. This is just an average -- a lot of infected people don't infect anyone, while some infect very large numbers, like dozens. The reasons behind this are complex, not completely understood, and have to do with how much virus a person accumulates in their system, which varies with each person's unique immune response, along with where people happen to be in gatherings and such.
The virus is also not all that serious for most people that get it. It looks like it kills something like one half of one percent of its victims to one percent, depending on factors like how ready the local medical system is to deal with a rush of patients. Because it kills a small percentage of people who get it, and most infected people experience flu symptoms or less, the virus has a natural head start on spreading widely wherever it appears. But one percent of a whole lot of people is a whole lot of people. If one percent of a city of 10 million dies, that's 100,000 people. So it's easy to see how a city could be overwhelmed, like New York was early on.
It took till late in December for regular Chinese doctors in hospitals to piece together that something had gone very wrong, and it was not until January 9th that the first reported death occurred. Three days later, on January 12th, respiratory wards in Wuhan hospitals began to fill. That pattern would play out afterward around the world -- by the time anyone dies, thousands are already infected and the hospital system is under stress almost immediately afterward. On January 23rd, Wuhan was locked down. But by that point, Covid infections were already in enough countries that, even though China was able to suppress the virus with draconian lockdowns that included welding apartment doors shut, most of the rest of the world was not willing to go that far.
The virus arrived similarly in the US -- first a trickle, then a flood. On February 29th, the CDC for the first time reported a death in the US. Less than two weeks later, on March 12, Ohio announced its schools were shutting down. Less than two more weeks, and most of Ohio was shut down. Grocery store shelves went empty, cleaning products disappeared, people sat at home, washed their hands, and made homemade masks. People will continue to argue over whether the government did too much, or not enough, or just picked the wrong battles to fight. And while we might never reach an agreement over just which actions helped in which ways, hitting the breaks on normal life worked, at least a bit. In early April, coronavirus cases started to drop. By late April, deaths started to drop, too, and at a pretty good pace.
While AIDS was known for targeting risky sex and risky drug use, the coronavirus punished people for hanging out with friends, for visiting Grandma, for going to church. It wasn't that you had to rein in your wild behavior -- stopping the coronavirus demanded that people stop acting like normal human beings. Even in prison, people prefer the company of murderers and rapists to solitary confinement, which is why being thrown in solitary is a go-to punishment in jail. So, when deaths started dropping, people started acting a bit more normal, and deaths started going up again in July. Then, of course, people started acting less normal, and deaths went down in August and September.
We found ourselves locked into a cycle where, whenever things got worse, we pushed the death rate down, and whenever things got better, we let it go back up. The yo-yo might seem illogical, but there were no easy alternatives. Red states, blue states, Europeans, Indians -- all over the world the story played out in similar ways in a lot of places. People were unwilling to tolerate the hospital system being totally overwhelmed, and so there was an upper limit on how fast we let the virus spread through the population. People were unwilling to tolerate staying at home when things were getting better, and so there was a lower limit on how much better things could get before they got worse again.
The worst deaths occurred in the final major wave. In October, November, and December of 2020, deaths just rose, and rose, and rose. The coronavirus that causes Covid, like the other coronaviruses before it, appears to spread best in colder weather, so it had that going for it. And people were tired. A lot of people still put a lot of effort into continuing to contain the virus, but it was harder. People had seen this movie played out several times already.
In December, vaccines arrived. Or, at least, they arrived in theory. They didn't actually arrive right away in large enough numbers to turn things around, but the winter outbreak hit its peak cases some time around the beginning of January. At this point, maybe 25%, maybe more, of the population had been infected, giving them immunity. At the peak of the outbreak, perhaps 3-4% of the US was infected at any single moment -- so the population was rapidly becoming more immune. As cases faded, vaccinations stepped in and kept the immunity growing, and the virus began a slow descent that continued, with little interruption, for just about the next six months.
At present, cases are down about 95%. There's little virus circulating, at least compared to before, and vaccinations have slowed down a lot. A faster variant of the virus is out there, and cases are leveling off. They'll probably go up a bit the next few weeks. But there just isn't room for the coronavirus to do damage like it did before.
67% of adults are vaccinated. Probably something like half of the unvaccinated have already had the virus. So the adult population is probably something like 85% immune. It is very unlikely that the threshold for herd immunity, at least throughout most places, is more than about 90%. So while the virus has already infected maybe 35% of the population, it's very difficult to imagine it will infect even another 10%. And the people still able to get infected are disproportionately young. Almost all of the pieces have been removed from the board.
The story of the Delta variant has not yet played itself out. Its cases are still rising, and when cases move up in the next few weeks, there will probably be alarmed news stories. But the Delta variant, the worst thing the virus has been able to throw at us so far, doesn't do a very good of infecting people who were sick before, or vaccinated people.
So the Delta story will play itself out, and then after that, once we've reached whatever the critical threshold of immune people is, there'll probably be smaller pockets of the virus here and there for a long time, maybe forever.
But the acute crisis stage of the coronavirus shows every sign of being behind us. I see no good reason to keep running a week-by-week summary of what's happening with the virus. Now, we're at about 300 deaths per day, and about 600 deaths per day is the strength of an unusually bad flu season. If deaths pass 600 per day, I'll cover it. Otherwise, I think I'll just check in on where things stand about once a month.
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