The Pandemic Blog

My good friends Julie and David McCullough sent me a very interesting email this weekend. It contained links to two articles ( here and here . The first of these provides far more detail) about a recent study that asked a simple question: Why is it so much more likely that people aged 50 and over will die of Covid-19 than younger people? This pattern hasn’t been evident in other viral diseases. The researchers who asked this question wondered if the difference might be explained by other vaccinations. They noted specifically that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine became available in 1971. This means that adults who were born before then are much less likely to have received the vaccine. Someone born in 1970 would be 50 this year. Of course, just the above facts don’t explain anything in themselves, since there could be all sorts of other reasons why people over 50 die of Covid at higher rates than those under 50. However, there are some countries that have tried to vaccina...

On April 16 (which turned out to be almost exactly the day Covid deaths peaked, so far anyway), I began my post with the verse from a song that was very significant to me in my teenage years, the “Fixin’ to die rag” by Country Joe and the Fish. The verse reads So it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Viet Nam! And it’s five, six, seven, open them pearly gates. There ain’t no time to wonder why – Whoopee! – We’re all gonna die! Of course, this song was written at the height the Vietnam War. It expresses incredulity that so many people supported the war wholeheartedly, even though there was no clear rationale for why we were even fighting in Vietnam, and what we might possibly accomplish through the sacrifice of so many American lives. Of course, the answer to these questions became clear to the whole country later: The Vietnam War was a waste of 57,000 American lives and over a million Vietnamese ones. The only r...

I updated my numbers for the first time since Nov. 7 just now. There were some amazing differences in just 19 days: 1.       I was projecting 31,000 deaths in November then. Now it’s 40,000. 2.       All my projections are simply based on the current 7-day percent change in new deaths. It was 3.0% then. It is 4.7% now. Moreover, the rate of change in that number (the second derivative) is itself increasing. 3.       While I didn’t project deaths for December on Nov. 7, I would probably have guessed it would be maybe 34,000, based on the 3.0% 7-day rate at the time. With today’s 4.7% rate, that number is 64,000. Does anyone doubt that exponential growth is a terrible thing (at least when you’re talking about deaths from disease)? 4.       I would have projected about 300,000 deaths for the year on Nov. 7. Now it’s 340,000. Even more striking, this makes it almost a lead pipe cinch ...