This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-9-10, 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.
This week, for the first time since June, the CDC's numbers tell us that the daily number of Covid cases is falling. This week averaged 136,738 cases per day, down from 155,347 a week ago.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who's been following the weekly growth rate of the virus. To recap, starting with the week ending July 8th, and following every week on from there, the weekly growth rates in this big Delta wave have been 70%, 58%, 53%, 40%, 21%, 13%, 6%, 0%, and now -12%.
In other words, us hitting the downslope of the Delta story is perfectly consistent with what we've been seeing over the last two months. It's also consistent with the basic math of epidemiology -- with millions of infections per week, plus millions of vaccine doses per week, all being given to a population that was already by summer 2021 about 83% immune to the coronavirus, we are hitting the point the great majority of people have either already had a vaccine or already been infected.
It doesn't leave a whole lot of room for continuing large numbers of severe infections. This doesn't mean we are out of the woods yet. There is still the possibility that something worse than Delta will surface, and even if nothing worse than Delta shows up for a while, it still may take some time before the deaths go down to very low levels.
Experts increasingly think that Covid is never going to completely go away, but once almost everyone in the population has some level of immunity, more and more of the Covid cases we do have should be mild, and even then we should have less Covid cases.
I hope they're right. This week was some very good news on that front.
Just for reference, as things go forward, the flu kills about 100 to 600 people per day in a flu season, depending on whether it's very mild (about 100), very severe (about 600) or somewhere in between. So right now, at about 1100 deaths per day, this is worse than even a really bad flu season in recent history. If the deaths drop below 100 deaths per day, then Covid will be killing less people than even the mildest flu season.
So if you want to talk about when things will seem "normal" again, I'd say as a rough rule of thumb once deaths drop to below 600, things will be fairly normal, the way flu seasons are "normal". And once they drop and stay below 100, then things will be very normal.
This week was a nice big step toward normal.
Sources
The Covid stats come from the CDC's Covid Tracking website, except for the one about 83% of the population being immune by summer 2021, which is from Jones et al., "Estimated US Infection- and Vaccine-Induced SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence Based on Blood Donations, July 2020-May 2021", which can be found here.
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