This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-8-6, 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.
Time for the August Covid check-in. According to Axios, 54% of Americans think the worst of the pandemic is ahead of us. The available evidence suggests 54% percent of Americans are misunderstanding the current situation.
Here's the main reasons. (1) The vaccinated population, which includes 80 or 90% of people over 65, has effectively exited the pandemic, and is experiencing death rates much lower than flu. (2) The unvaccinated minority is disproportionately young and healthy now compared to previous waves of the virus, and the number of people still vulnerable to the virus is shrinking rapidly due to infections and shots. (3) Because the number of people still vulnerable to the virus is shrinking rapidly, the Delta variant is, week by week, losing its ability to rapidly spread through the US, and this can be clearly seen in the testing statistics.
In other words, we are in the very late stages of what's left of the pandemic, no matter how the headlines might feel. That's the short story. The longer version of the same thing, for the nerds, is below.
VACCINATED POPULATION
Right now, at least 70% of Americans have received at least one shot. 80% of seniors are fully vaccinated, and 90% are at least partially vaccinated. Vaccinated people, for pretty much all practical purposes, are done with the pandemic.
Now, these people are not totally immune from catching Covid in all cases. I'm sure you've seen the headlines about that, and it would be easy to imagine that this means vaccinated people are still at risk. And it's true that they are at some risk of testing positive, and at a small but real risk of catching a cough or having a wicked headache. But deaths are generally not occurring in this group. Part of the reason it's easy to miss this is that people are naturally bad with numbers, and when they see something like "vaccines are 88% effective against Delta" (that's one number that's been thrown out there; other numbers are similar) -- it's easy to think that means that vaccination only lowers your risk of death by 88%. But that's not quite right. The "effective" numbers you see in headlines are almost always "effectiveness against testing positive for Covid". But even among those vaccinated people who do test positive for Covid, the disease is generally much less severe.
So far this year, 1400 vaccinated people have died of Covid. Including last year, the total number of people who died of Covid in the US is at about 600,000. This compares to about 36,000 people each year who die of the flu. Any way you slice and dice the numbers, the risk of a vaccinated person dying of Covid is much smaller than the flu risk the typical person lives with. It's a smaller risk than getting murdered, dying in a car accident, dying of some other form of accidental injury. In other words, if you are vaccinated, then Covid is one of those small backgrounds risks that we all deal with for you.
If you've been vaccinated, you're safe. If you don't feel safe, that's understandable. We've come out of a really nasty year, and the news is throwing all sorts of scary stories at you. But you're going to be just fine, unless you crash your car, or get cancer, or what have you. You are not living in a Covid emergency anymore, whether you believe it or not.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE HAD COVID
If you've had Covid before, and you've recovered, your odds of catching it again and dying are practically non-existent. There's three confirmed deaths due to reinfection in the whole history of this pandemic, and 299 deaths that are suspected due to reinfection.
In other words, you are in the safest group of all. You could die of covid yet, but you could also be killed in an attack by a household cat. The two are similar levels of risk.
If you've had covid before, you are no longer living in an emergency. You're immune. You're going to be okay.
PEOPLE WHO AREN'T VACCINATED AND HAVEN'T HAD COVID
This group is still living through a pandemic. This group is mostly fairly comfortable living through a pandemic. And because most of the elderly have been vaccinated, this group is mostly young people who are going to be fine.
If you're unvaccinated, you're taking a risk. I would like you to get vaccinated, just like I would like you to wear a seatbelt and I would like you to not smoke. But you're in a fairly small group, and you're willingly taking on that risk, so I'm not too worried about you. And the group you're in is shrinking.
There's about 140 million unvaccinated adults in the US, but maybe half of you have already had covid, so that leaves maybe 70 million. Maybe less. About three million people are getting their first shot every week, and by some estimates seven million people are getting Covid every week.
So we're running out of unvaccinated people who haven't had Covid. Soon, there will be so few of them that the disease won't be able to spread much. And then all of us, vaccinated or not, will be in a very safe place.
In fact, if we look carefully at the weekly Covid statistics, we can already see clear signs that the Delta wave is burning itself out.
THE DELTA WAVE STARTS STOPPING
In the very short-term, it looks like the virus is winning, and that's because the case counts keep rising every day. Deaths happen on a three or four week delay from cases, and so the death counts will make it look like the virus is winning a little longer than even the case counts will.
But what determines the future of the virus isn't the exact number of people getting infected right now. It's how many people each infected person infects, expressed as an average, and projected out into the future over weeks and months. They call that R_t in the stats world. When R_t is above one, the virus spreads to more and more people. When it's below, less and less.
Even without calculating R_t, which is difficult, we can learn more or less the same sort of thing by just comparing infection numbers week to week. So let's do that, starting with the beginning of June, when the Delta Wave took off.
On June 8th, the rolling seven-day average of cases was 17,835, which means that from June 2 through 8, an average of 17,835 tested positive for Covid. The next week, ending June 15, the number was 30,588. In other words, the week ending June 15th saw 1.72 times as many cases as the previous week.
Let's call this the "rise rate", because I can't think of anything clever. So the rise rate on June 15th was 1.72. On June 22, it was 1.56. On June 29, 1.47. As of yesterday, the last date we have data for, 1.37.
Expressed as percents, we'd say the percentage rise each week fell from 72%, to 56%, to 47%, to 37%. The virus is having a harder and harder time doing its spectacular spreading trick every week, as it continues to find less and less susceptible people. Its growth rate is only half of what it was three weeks ago.
CONCLUSION
Everything we see right now points toward one conclusion: we're at the tail end of an emergency. Most people have the emergency behind them, and what's left of the emergency is burning itself out. It's hard to see on the news, because journalists can't do math, and you probably won't find anyone doing something simple like tracking week to week infection multipliers on TV, or in any major news outlet. And that's weird, when the country is in a situation where the future is primarily controlled by week to week infection multipliers.
Of course, all things are possible. Things could always get much better or worse for unexpected reasons. But, given the information we have now, the future looks bright. Mathematically, normal life looks much closer than the news coverage implies. Covid may not ever "go away" in a total and permanent sense. But we are rapidly barrelling toward a world were Covid, like whooping cough, polio, and malaria, just isn't a major threat to Americans. And most Americans are already there.
SOURCES
Most data from CDC Covid Data Tracker: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
Data on reinfections from BNO News: https://bnonews.com/.../08/covid-19-reinfection-tracker/
Most Americans pessimistic about future of pandemic: https://www.axios.com/america-pandemic-polling.
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