The Pandemic Blog

I’d say we’re in the fifth wave now – and we never got out of the fourth one. Just a little perspective: ·         The week of July 4, there were 234 Covid deaths per day. That figure stayed below 1,000 until late August. It hasn’t gone below that level since then. ·         In early October, we hit the high so far for the fourth wave: 2,225 deaths per day. ·         Since then, deaths per day have been generally declining. Last week, we were at 1,110/day. ·         However, in the seven days ended Sunday, deaths per day jumped to 1,475. ·         Given that daily new cases are again on an upward trend, and that we have cold weather and the holidays starting, there isn’t much likelihood that new deaths will go back down anytime soon, and they may well keep increasing. Of course, the great majority of people who are dying of Covid nowadays are unvaccinated. Arithmetically speaking, the way to reduce those deaths to flu-like levels is to get everybody vaccinated, but we kno

  The WaPo published today a story that I hope will become a series – about one of the many acts or non-acts of the Trump administration that led the US to become the world leader in Covid deaths (OK, India may be the real world leader despite their official numbers. So maybe we’re number two). The story was written not just as a retrospective, but because new information sheds light on what was behind the event. This was an event I remember well: when the CDC suddenly changed its testing guidance last August to say that people who weren’t experiencing Covid symptoms and hadn’t been in contact with an infected person didn’t need to be tested. It was clear at the time that this was a deliberate effort – one of many, of course – by the Trump administration to keep the Covid numbers as low as possible. The goal was that asymptomatic cases would come and go without anybody knowing about them. Of course, the problem with this strategy was that people who were asymptomatically infect