The Pandemic Blog

We’re just beginning to learn about a new virus that’s started to spread in a country across the ocean and is killing a lot of the people it infects; we see horrifying scenes of overcrowded hospitals and new graveyards quickly filling up. Sure, a small number of cases of that virus have now been detected in the US, but few people in the US are very concerned about it. Since we have such a robust public health system and we’ve blocked travel from the affected country, it’s hard to believe that we won’t be able to keep the new virus under tight control. Of course, a few malcontents point out that the new virus might already be spreading inside the US, since our ability to test for the new virus – even in people who have unexplained sicknesses – is woefully inadequate. But who listens to those people, anyway? Of course, that is the situation the US was in almost exactly one year ago with the novel coronavirus. But it’s also the situation we’re in today. In fact, we’re in that situat...

I saw yesterday that there are now articles suggesting the US has reached the peak (or is close to reaching it) of coronavirus cases, and things will only get better from here on in. After all, we’re now vaccinating a million people a day and we now have a president who actually wants to beat the virus, not surrender to it. It might be slow, but soon things will start getting better. That is what I would say, were it not for one thing (actually three things): the three new variants of the coronavirus, found originally in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, that spread much faster than the current version. Moreover, Boris Johnson said on Friday that the UK variant may be inherently more deadly, not just a faster spreader. For a horrifying picture of what is happening in the UK now, see this Times article. As I pointed out in this post recently, the CDC now says the UK variant – which isn’t very widespread in the US now - will become the leading variant by the end of March. And give...

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried a great article about how the U.K. is reeling from the impact of the new strain of the coronavirus, which was first detected there in September but is now driving a huge increase in new cases and deaths. Early in the article, we find this sentence: “…over the past week, Covid-19 deaths have been running at more than 1,000 a day, a 50% increase from the week before.” Remember, we’re talking about deaths here; they’ve doubled in one week. And this is a huge number, given their population. The UK has a little bit more than 1/5 of the US population. Since our deaths are running close to 4,000 a day, this means their deaths per population are now about a quarter higher than ours (and of course, given our status as the nation with the highest absolute number of deaths and one of the highest number of deaths per population, that is no mean feat). However, if ours were to double when the UK variant finally becomes widespread (which is inevitable), w...

I hadn’t reported the numbers from my spreadsheet since New Year’s Day. I was stunned to see how much the situation has deteriorated since then. The most appalling change is my projection for total January deaths (based just on deaths so far and a continuation of the current 7-day rate of increase in total deaths). As you can see below, that projection has jumped by 22,000 since 1/1. Unfortunately, it’s likely that by March we’ll look back on January as the good old days, when we only had a 9/11’s worth of deaths every day, rather than perhaps a 9/11 with a Pearl Harbor thrown in for good measure. That’s because the CDC announced yesterday that the new highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus, which was first noticed in the UK about two months ago, will be the dominant form in the US by late March. This new variant isn’t inherently more deadly, but just the fact that so many more people will become sick means that deaths will rapidly increase, likely aggravated by more ho...

A WaPo article from two days ago tells a particularly scary story – both for what it might mean for Ireland and what it might mean for the US. It starts out: In the last weeks of 2020, Ireland had one of the lowest  coronavirus  cases per capita in the European Union. Today, it has the highest in the entire world. While countries across Europe battle a third wave, in Ireland, the trajectory in recent weeks isn’t just an upward curve: It’s the path of a rocket ship. Going into Christmas week, Ireland was reporting 10 new coronavirus cases each day per 100,000 residents — compared with about 66 cases per 100,000 residents in the United States. But three weeks later, Ireland is reporting more than 132 new cases per 100,000, according to the latest seven-day rolling average compiled by Johns Hopkins University, while the United States has risen less dramatically, to about 75 cases per 100,000. Why did this happen? One reason seems to be that they made a big mistake in ...

It’s safe to say that Trump’s presidency effectively ended yesterday, even if he avoids being thrown out of the White House on his ear before Inauguration Day. He leaves in his wake so many disasters that it will take years just to identify them all. But here are two having to do with the pandemic. First: Yesterday, according to Worldometers.info, the US logged a record for Covid deaths: 4,100. To top it off (since Trump loves superlatives), we also logged a record number of new cases: 260,973. I’m not sure there’s ever been a day when we broke both records. Thanks, Donald! Second and more importantly: According to the CDC , once again we seem to have missed our chance to mitigate the spread of a deadly new virus, in fact two of them. I’m referring to the two new variants of the coronavirus, one first identified in the UK and the other in South Africa. The CDC believes they’ve both achieved a good foothold in the US, although we can’t know for sure since the US is 42 nd in the w...

Recently, while rummaging through some papers left behind by my father, I found an interesting newspaper clipping dated December 8, 1941. I was so fascinated by it that I read it several times and committed most of it to memory. This is fortunate, since when I went to copy it, it crumbled to dust in my hands. In fact, I don’t even know what newspaper it was from.   As the whole country knows, yesterday there was a military attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in the territory of Hawaii. Many believed that Japan was behind that attack, and indeed President Roosevelt was reported to be planning to give a speech to Congress today declaring war on Japan. However, we were all stunned by the announcement, only 15 minutes before Congress was to convene, that there would be no speech for the moment. Fortunately, our reporter was able to obtain a short interview with the president shortly after this event. He didn’t have time to take notes because the president was pressed for ti...

I posted on New Year’s Day about the fact that – surprise, surprise! – the Trump administration is bungling the rollout of the new Pfizer Covid vaccine, even though the vaccine itself was developed, tested and approved in record time. I speculated about the reasons for this, but in this morning’s WaPo, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University provided a much more authoritative take in a Perspective titled “Vaccination is going slowly because nobody is in charge”. The subtitle of the article is “We’ve known for months that vaccines were coming. Why weren’t we prepared to use them?” And that pretty well sums up the whole article: The wonderful Trump administration “planners” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) never considered it their responsibility to take any thought to how, once they’d rushed the vaccines to the states, the states would deliver them into people’s arms. And of course, they never seem to have considered that the $340 million provided to the states to prepare for vaccin...

As you probably know already, despite the administration’s promises just a few weeks ago to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of December, probably no more than 3 million actually were vaccinated. What’s really ironic is that, after doing so good a job getting the vaccine(s) developed and tested in record time, and despite Pfizer’s having already manufactured and shipped more than 11 million doses, it seems we’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. Leanna Wen of WaPo estimated that, at the current rate of vaccination, it will be ten years before 80% of the population (which is the current estimate of what’s needed to achieve herd immunity) has been immunized with two doses. There seem to be two main problems causing this: 1.       Millions of doses are sitting in Pfizer’s warehouses, as Pfizer waits to be told where to ship them. 2.       Once at their destination, they’re not getting injected. But don’t worry, there’s no sh...