The Pandemic Blog

The NY Times reported this morning that a Brazilian Senate panel recommended yesterday that President Bolsonaro – and 77 other people, including three of his sons - be charged with nine crimes, including “crimes against humanity”. What did they do? They “(allowed) the coronavirus to spread unchecked through Brazil in a bid to reach herd immunity.” Brazil has had 739,000 Covid deaths, compared to 757,000 in the US. However, on a per capita basis, Brazil is way ahead of the US in terms of deaths. But did either Brazil or the US get anywhere near herd immunity, even with vaccines? Nope. This is because the availability of vaccines has pushed up the level of “people with antibodies” (i.e. those who have either had Covid or been vaccinated, although having had Covid confers less immunity than vaccination) required for herd immunity, even though vaccines have reduced the absolute number of deaths from what they would have been with herd immunity and without vaccines. Remember, there ...

I was amazed to look at my spreadsheet just now and discover that daily Covid-19 deaths in the US, in the week ended last Sunday, were 3,753. This is the highest number since February 6. Yes, daily new cases fell again this week, but they’re still higher than they were in February, when vaccinations were just starting to have their effect, and we were coming down from the peak of the terrible third wave in January. And I’d like to point out that daily deaths in that third wave were mostly lower in January than they were last week. But in January, we were moaning about the terrible toll caused by lax attitudes during the holidays – and hoping that vaccinations would start to make a difference soon. They did make a difference, but now deaths are back to their level in January! I wondered if deaths might be going back up because more sick people were dying – since the chances of dying from Covid are about 10 times higher for an unvaccinated person than a vaccinated one. However, th...