This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-8-19, 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 said, back in June, that I was planning to check in on the coronavirus stats just once a month unless deaths exceeded 600 per day, which is about the norm in a bad flu season. Well, we've now hit 640 deaths per day, which is slightly worse than a really bad flu season. Daily cases are 133,000 per day and climbing. But this isn't a return to how things were last winter by any stretch of the imagination. Back in the winter, most people weren't immune. Today, most people are.
There is a great deal of talk about breakthrough cases among vaccinated people, about booster shots of vaccine, and so on. And there is a kernel of truth in this. There are people who got one or two shots who have gotten the virus afterward. There are even a few people who have died. But it's a good thing to check the proportions. A recent New York Times page keeps tabulating state statistics on the vaccinated and unvaccinated Covid death rates. Doing a little math on their charts shows that, in a typical state, about 6 out of every 100,000 vaccinated people have died of Covid since vaccination began, while about 120 out of every 100,000 unvaccinated have. So there's two different situations going on: the vaccinated are experiencing something quite a bit milder than a flu season, and the rest something quite a bit harsher.
The Delta variant continues to spread, at higher and higher levels every week. But it's not a spread that's spiraling out of control: it's spread that looks like it's coming to a peak. Starting on July 7, and then moving forward every seven days till yesterday, the weekly rolling average of cases has been about 17k, 29k, 45k, 71k, 99k, 117k, and 133k. Or, to put it more clearly in percentage terms, that's weekly increases of 77%, 53%, 57%, 40%, 18%, and 14%. We seem to be heading very steadily toward a peak.
This should not be too surprising. 72% of adults have now had at least one shot, 13% of adults have tested positive -- the real number of infections must be quite a bit higher, and the remaining pool of the susceptible is continuing to shrink as about 3 million people receive their first shot each week, and about a million known cases of Covid occur, and perhaps another two million, untested. We are still rapidly on pace toward the day when almost everyone has either been vaccinated or has had their turn with the virus, at which point it will only be able to circulate at low levels. The clock is ticking, and you can watch the Delta variant's time running out in the steady drop in the weekly growth rate: 77, 53, 57, 40, 18, 14.
Sources
The basic statistics all come from the CDC Covid Data Tracker website, except for the numbers on death rates among the vaccinated and unvaccinated, which are courtesy of the New York Times.
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