The Pandemic Blog

In the early days of the pandemic, I remember reading that the coronavirus seemed to be very different from other viruses because it didn’t mutate very much. And I remember that, in April or May, Los Alamos National Labs (known more as the birthplace of the atomic bomb than a medical research center) said that they’d identified a new variant that was more transmissible than the current one. The traditional medical research establishment responded to the effect of “These people should stick to finding new ways to kill people, not save them.” They also pooh-poohed the idea that the LANL researchers had found a more-transmissible variant. So there was surprise when the British identified a variant that was not only more transmissible, but in 3 months became the dominant variety there (and killed a lot of people in the process. They’ve determined it’s also more deadly); that variant will become dominant in the US by late March, according to the CDC. That was bad enough, but it was foll...

I confess that I haven’t had much time to work on this blog lately, mainly because the consulting business which keeps me and my wife (and at least a few of her family members in Vietnam) alive has kept me very busy – and also because there has been a lot going on in the field of cybersecurity for the electric power industry, the subject of my other blog . However, I updated the numbers just now for the first time this month, and noticed some interesting things: ·         In a few days, we’ll pass the dismal milestone of 500,00 reported Covid deaths in the US due to the pandemic (and undoubtedly many more non-Covid deaths caused by the pandemic). ·         The number of daily new cases has fallen, as has been widely reported in the press. In fact we’re now back to around 100,000 new cases a day, after being up to about 300,000 on at least a few days in the last 6 weeks. ·       ...

Last week, WaPo published an article that starts with this sentence: “Former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election largely because of his handling of the  coronavirus  pandemic, according to a post-election autopsy completed by Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio.” I’ll let you read the article, but the only surprising thing about it is that the report was clearly a surprise to the Trump campaign, and probably to Trump himself (if he ever read it, of course, which is doubtful). It shouldn’t be any surprise that, when a leader has handled a crisis so badly that hundreds of thousands of his countrymen have died needlessly, he ended up paying the price for this at the polls. What always amazed me about Trump’s performance on the coronavirus was that, if he’d just done his ____ing job , even if he hadn’t done it particularly well, he would probably have been unbeatable in the election. Instead, he let his rotten instincts rule him – as he always has. Of course th...

There are a few new data points that I’m trying to absorb now, that might help answer the two questions in the title. First, a recent study showed (and this only confirms other studies from as long ago as last summer) that the actual number of Covid-19 infections in the US is at least ten times larger than the reported number. In other words, a huge number of people were infected but never experienced symptoms, or at least they didn’t consider them serious enough even to get tested. Of course, this is what the advocates of pursuing herd immunity (like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ) have been pointing to all along as evidence that we should just let the virus rip until we have herd immunity (and of course, vaccinations will hasten that outcome). The estimate I heard was that about 120 million Americans – about one third of the population – have been infected already. So, far from hectoring people about wearing masks now, we should be opening up the bars, movie theat...

I hadn’t updated my spreadsheet numbers in two weeks, so I just did it. Total deaths for January were about 7,000 fewer than what I projected two weeks ago, based on the current growth rate in deaths, but January was still the worst month for deaths so far in the pandemic – almost 20,000 more than the previous record, set in December. The growth rates in both cases and deaths have declined in the past two weeks, which is good. It would be nice if they continued to decline, but the wild card here is the three new variants from overseas, and especially the Brazilian one that decimated the city of Manaus. Manaus was reveling in a low number of cases and deaths in December, and one scientific study said they’d achieved herd immunity. And then the onslaught from the new variant came, aggravated (as in Ireland and the UK ) by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. As these countries – and even Denmark – have shown us, this situation can turn around literally on a dime, due to these ne...