The Pandemic Blog

There were some news stories this weekend, stating that new Covid cases had started increasing again. That’s true, but this doesn’t yet constitute a turnaround. Here are the average daily new cases for the first four weeks of February (ending on Sundays): 63,669, 54,373, 62,874 and 63,004. In other words, new cases jumped up two weeks ago, and in the past week they increased a little more. We’re now more or less back where we were at the beginning of the month. But again, these numbers are far too high, period. We didn’t have 63,000 average daily new cases ever until last summer, and there was about a one-month period when they were mostly a little above that level. Then they went down as the second wave receded. As the third wave hit, they passed 63,000 last October 15, and never went below that again until two weeks ago. With daily deaths still over 1,000, we’re nowhere near finished with the pandemic. Meanwhile, the UK variant is increasingly found in the US. The CDC said a coup...

  Note from Tom: My email feed didn't seem to work on Monday, so those of you who read my posts in the emails didn't see this post . I think it's pretty interesting, so you might want to look at it now. Since I’m now updating my numbers every seven days, I was struck – but not terribly surprised – to see that the decline in the growth rate of new total Covid cases turned around last week. The weekly growth rate was 1.3% a week ago, but is now up to 1.5%. And the absolute new case numbers are more striking: In the last seven days new cases averaged 62,874 a day, vs. 54,373 in the previous week. Of course, this is just one week, so it’s not in itself too much cause for worry. However, the first time when daily new cases even reached this level was October 15. At the time, that seemed like a very worrisome sign. And it definitely was, since one month later, on Nov. 15, there were 147,000 new cases, on Dec. 15 there were 201,000, and on Jan. 15 there were 248,000. Of course, it...

Yesterday, Kevin Perry sent me this really interesting article that made a very powerful point: the pandemic wasn’t in any way “inevitable”. Just a simple decision by one person in Wuhan on one day in the late fall of 2019 may have been all it took to make the novel coronavirus become the source of a pandemic, rather than simply another new virus strain that infected a few people, then quickly went extinct. Of course, that person isn’t known and never will be – and they almost certainly don’t realize their role. The article confirms that the first superspreading of the virus occurred at a particular seafood market in Wuhan. This has been suspected from the beginning of the pandemic, simply because all of the first reported infections were of people who worked in or visited the market. But there was also a lot of speculation early on that the fact that there were live animals at the market (fish in this case) was somehow the cause of the virus jumping to humans the first time. Th...

I just updated my numbers for the first time in a month. I’ve changed the reporting so that I don’t have to record new deaths and cases every day in my spreadsheet, as I used to – now it’s just once a week. And I’m no longer trying to project at all – I just report what’s happened so far. And that is quite good. In the last 30 days or so, the 7-day rates of increase in total deaths and total cases have both dropped in half, and there isn’t any sign of leveling off yet (as was the case in mid-February). Of course, that could change at any moment, and a couple of the new variants are worrisome – especially the one in Brazil. Of course, one reason for the drop in new cases is vaccinations. But there’s still a real question how long the vaccine will last, and whether there’s any vaccine that would provide immunity against all new strains of the virus. It’s still very possible that the coronavirus will end up being like the flu virus – it will mutate so much that a new shot will be need...