Forget about large in-person meetings for a long time – perhaps years

The WHO – under pressure from a lot of doctors – yesterday put out a notice that transmission of the novel coronavirus can occur through aerosols, which are droplets that are so small they don’t fall to the ground right away, and can float in the air for a long time. This means that just one infected person in a large indoor event can easily infect lots of other people, if the air is recirculated and not either replaced with outside air or constantly filtered. One notorious study of a restaurant in Wuhan showed that a single infected person in a restaurant infected literally everybody who was downwind of the air vent.

The important lesson from this is that maintaining a six foot distance from other people (and wearing a mask when you have to be closer than that) is no longer assurance that you won’t catch Covid-19 in an indoor setting where there are other people present, especially if the air isn’t constantly replaced with outside air or constantly filtered.

When will this end? It should end when a vaccine is developed, manufactured in quantity to inoculate the whole world, and given to enough people (at least 70% of the world population) that herd immunity develops. What are the obstacles to that?

1.      It’s rare that a workable, safe vaccine is developed in less than five years. Mumps was one of the fastest, and that was four years. 40 years after AIDS appeared, there’s still no vaccine. It would be nice if at least one of the 150 or so vaccine development efforts around the world panned out, but it’s very possible that none of them will, for one reason or another.

2.      It would be a massive job to manufacture the vaccine in quantities required to vaccinate everybody in the world, yet that’s what’s required. No country will be perfectly safe until the virus is eradicated worldwide – right now the US is close to the most unsafe country in the world (and don’t count on our being one of the first to get the vaccine unless we develop it. Withdrawing from the WHO might put us near the end of the line – thanks, Donald!). And God forbid the vaccine has to be renewed every year, or even less than that.

3.      But there’s also the little problem of getting people to accept the vaccine. We already had a problem getting people to accept measles vaccines for their children, even though there’s no doubt that they’re safe. How about persuading them that a product that was rushed through development, testing and manufacturing is safe? And especially when the White House and many other public figures have made a cottage industry of trashing the public’s trust in experts like Dr. Fauci and the CDC – who will undoubtedly have to sell the public on the vaccine’s safety? Once again, thanks Donald!

Until there’s a vaccine, I doubt any large gatherings of any type will be considered safe (say over 50 people, and maybe less than that). Even though I’m sure some jurisdictions will start allowing them (and some are now, although in the US I think they should all be banned), the problem will be: will people come to them? We got a good answer to this recently, when Trump said a million or more people wanted to attend his Tulsa rally and only about 6,000 actually did, according to the city of Tulsa. Even then, there have been close to 500 new cases in Tulsa in the last two days, which the director of the Tulsa Health Department says is at least partly caused by the rally. One can assume that lots of Trump supporters really wanted to come to the rally, but they weighed the risk vs. the benefit and decided to stay home.

And that’s the problem: What large gathering – a wedding, a funeral, a trade convention, etc. – is essential enough to attend when there’s a serious risk you’ll get infected there? I literally can’t think of anything – other than if my one unmarried child got married, and I’m sure she wouldn’t want a big gathering anyway – that would make me attend something like that.

And that brings me to CovidFest 2020 – I’m sorry, I mean the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month. I hope I can discuss this tomorrow.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into the projected numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 3%.

Note that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4 weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks previous.

However, once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays - after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no significant intervening changes.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5
March 21	244	35
March 28	1,928	275
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889
April 11	12,126	1,732
April 18	18,434	2,633
April 25	15,251	2,179
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	12,592	1,799
May 16	10,073	1,439
May 23	8,570	1,224
May 30	6,874	982
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
June 6	6,544	935
June 13	5,427	775
June 20	4,457	637
June 27	6,167	881
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
July 4	4,166	595
July 11	4,352	622
July 18	4,495	642
July 25	4,643	663
Month of July	20,240	653	85%
Total March – July	150,362

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 135,828

Increase in deaths since previous day: 945

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 3% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 3% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in the reported deaths numbers, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 3,220,559

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 61,045

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 13%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 1,426,483

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 135,828

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 9%

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post. Short answer: If this percentage declines, that’s good. It’s been steadily declining since a high of 41% at the end of March. But a good number would be 2%, like South Korea’s. An OK number would be 4%, like China’s.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com