Natural selection at work?

Note from Tom: FeedBurner, which has been sending out the emails with my blog posts, will stop doing this in July. I have engaged Follow.It to take over that immediately. If you are currently receiving the FeedBurner emails, your address has been transferred to Follow It. And if you’re not receiving emails now, you can remedy that problem by clicking on the menu icon in the top left of the main page of this blog.

I’m going to leave the FeedBurner feed active for a few more days, so you should receive both feeds of this post. If you received the FeedBurner feed for this post but you didn’t also receive the Follow.It feed, please drop me an email and I’ll add you to Follow.It. In theory, this shouldn’t happen, but one never knows… 

I was able to look at new US Covid cases and new deaths for both the last week and the month of May. If last week had been the end of the month, I would have said May was pretty disappointing. Yes, daily new cases (about 33,000) were about half of the April number (64,000). But daily deaths were only 10% less than in April.

However, last week was by far the best week of the pandemic: Daily new cases (103,000) were about half of the previous week’s (203,000). And daily new deaths (388) were less than half of the previous week’s. Most importantly, the 7-day growth rate in deaths was .04%, which is by far the best of the pandemic; in fact, the 1-day growth rate in deaths was never that low. And exactly the same thing can be said about total cases: the 7-day growth rate of .02% was by far the best of the pandemic, and was also less than any of the 1-day growth rates (except perhaps very recently. I stopped tracking daily numbers at the end of February). So, in the US at least, things are going quite well on the Covid front. Except…

I want to thank Kevin Perry for sending me this link to a Seattle Times article (Seattle is the county seat of King County, although it extends much beyond Seattle itself). The article was prompted by an offhand remark from Dr. Jeff Duchin, the chief health officer for Seattle and King County, who said that “of King County’s recent COVID-19 cases, 97%...occurred in unvaccinated people.”

Of course, this number is for one large metropolitan county, so it shouldn’t be taken as universally representative. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion (not that I was trying to escape it, of course) that anyone who is so far resisting getting vaccinated (no matter what their reason) is an idiot. In fact, one might go further and draw the conclusion that this shows that natural selection is indeed at work, and people who continue to resist getting vaccinated will eventually…well, they’ll go the way of the carrier pigeon or the dodo bird.

Of course, the problem with saying this is that there are still a lot of people who for medical reasons or because they’re still too young to receive vaccines in the US (i.e. kids under 12) have to remain unvaccinated. So we still have to try hard to persuade everyone who can receive a vaccination to do so. They clearly aren’t very concerned about their own health, but maybe they can be concerned about the people they’re endangering by following this course.

One of my brother’s in-laws is battling cancer and has been told in no uncertain terms by his doctor that he can’t be around anyone who’s not vaccinated. A niece of his from California – who has been opposed to being vaccinated – recently announced that she is moving to Illinois (where my brother’s in-law is) and she was looking forward to being able to see him regularly. He had to break the news to her that she couldn’t see him until she gets vaccinated. I don't know how she took this news, nor do I know whether she has since been vaccinated or not. I hope she has. Life’s too short to waste it on destroying both yourself and other completely innocent people. Especially when they’re your relatives.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, June 6.

Month	Deaths reported during month	Avg. deaths per day during period	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept.	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct.	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov.	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec.	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,064	3,163	123%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March	72,693	2,345	105%
Month of April	47,593	1,598	66%
Month of May	43,339	1,445	90%
Total Pandemic so far	612,336	1,323

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Average deaths last seven days: 388

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.4%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 34,210,782

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 102,871 (= 14,696/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.2%  

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