One morning, a year ago today…

 

I clicked on a link that a friend had sent me a couple days earlier, recommending I read it right away. I might never have clicked on it at all, but I have respect for this person's judgment, so I did. It was a long article with lots of charts, but I ended up spending at least a couple hours on it, trying to make sure I understood its meaning. I did this because it seemed to be saying we were in for a lot of trouble – much more than I’d suspected (or most other people suspected) up to this point. Even though my state (Illinois) had just closed all schools the previous day (we were one of the first states to do so), the magnitude of the problem hadn’t registered on me – until I read the article.

And the meaning was all too clear to me: Unless drastic action was taken on national, state and local levels immediately, there could be a huge number of deaths due to the novel coronavirus in the US. For every day of delay in doing this, there would be 20,000 additional cases. I didn’t forecast how many deaths this would translate into, but using the 5% case fatality rate mentioned in the article, this would translate into 1,000 extra deaths for every additional day of delay – starting the next day (of course that ended up being an underestimate. It seems the extra week we took to lock down cost more than 20,000 lives). The article concludes with these two paragraphs:

This is an exponential threat. Every day counts. When you’re delaying by a single day a decision, you’re not contributing to a few cases maybe. There are probably hundreds or thousands of cases in your community already. Every day that there isn’t social distancing, these cases grow exponentially.

This is probably the one time in the last decade that sharing an article might save lives. They need to understand this to avert a catastrophe. The moment to act is now.

I wanted to get the word out about this, so I decided to write a post on my cybersecurity blog, where it would be seen (and hopefully read) by over 1,000 people. I just reread it, and I think I did a good job of summarizing the article, although it’s also quite interesting to look at the article itself. It had had as I recall around 10 million hits already (it was a little more than a week old) when I read it, and less than two weeks later it had 40 million. I know a few weeks after that it was over 100 million, but they don’t seem to be tracking hits on it anymore.

I thought this might be a one-time post, but the next day I began to read more, and felt compelled to write more posts – in fact, I wrote one a day for at least 3-4 months, and maybe longer than that. In a couple of weeks I set up this Pandemic Blog, where I continue to post, although I’ve really cut back the frequency because of being busy in my day job. I’m going to try to post at least once a week from now on and update my numbers then (I’m going to update them tomorrow, and every seven days thereafter).

I’d like to put some of these posts from the last year into a book, along with some comments on them. I went through quite a trajectory over this past year - at first thinking that the only thing that was required was to call people’s attention to the problem. The government would respond appropriately and contain the virus. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way, as we have just passed the 30 million case mark, and we’re about to pass 550,000 deaths.

The good news is the vaccine rollout is going much better than I imagined it could – given the terrible start it had in December (in fact, I just got my first shot last week, being in the senior category). But the bad news (which I want to write about soon) is that the new Brazil variant is ravaging that country and seems to infect people who have already been infected. What will we do if it infects people who have already been infected with the current strains, or more importantly have already been vaccinated? We’ll soon find out whether it does, since it’s already in the US.

In fact, the situation with the Brazil variant is a lot like the novel coronavirus was a year ago. Fortunately, our government’s response to it won’t be the unmitigated disaster that it was last year.

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

 

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