Not out of the woods yet

This past week saw an increase in the 7-day rates of change in both Covid cases and deaths in the US. Cases increased by .6% vs. .5% the previous week. And deaths increased by .9% vs. .7% the previous week. Of course, one week doesn’t in itself mean a change in direction, but at the least this shows that we’re unlikely to come anywhere close to zero cases in the near term – and perhaps ever. And that we need to prepare to take a booster vaccine shot in the early fall.

I heard on NPR just now that the vaccine manufacturers are now making boosters that address the new variants – although new variants (all more transmissible than earlier ones) are arriving with great regularity now.

Why is this happening? It’s simple: In countries with big current case numbers, the virus mutates much more quickly, and variants that are more transmissible quickly gain the upper hand (Iran, Russia, Malaysia and Nepal now lead the world in absolute numbers of new cases. India was number 13 in daily new cases yesterday with 127,000, although the actual number is probably much higher. Still, this is a lot better than over 400,000 daily reported new cases in India, about 4 weeks ago).

Which just goes to show that the US won’t be safe until the world is safe, period. All of the wealthy countries (and frankly, wealthy individuals in those countries) should donate whatever it takes to vaccinate most of the world’s population (I saw a figure of $50 billion somewhere today). It will literally be a money-saving proposition for all of us.

I want to thank my friend Reid Blickenstaff for pointing out this article in the Times, on the huge danger posed by the Indian variant in particular, although there are others as well (Vietnam just reported a variant that combines the English and Indian strains. And they’ve instituted strict lockdowns in the whole country, all this with total cases since the start of the pandemic of about 7,500 and total pandemic deaths of 47. They really have no choice, since their health system would be absolutely overwhelmed if there were a huge surge in cases. And they’re the kind of authoritarian system – like China – that can make drastic measures stick).

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, May 30.

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%
Total Pandemic so far	609,652	1,317

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Average deaths last seven days: 783

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.7%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 34,107,911

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 203,826 (= 29,118/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.6%  

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