Remember "herd immunity"?

 

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 infected could infect others, who would have symptoms and perhaps much worse. But, as the story describes, this policy change (which was reversed in a few weeks, although probably after a lot of damage had been done. We’ll never know how much) wasn’t somebody’s whim. It was a deliberate attempt by Trump’s new Dr. Fauci – Scott Atlas – designed not only to keep reported cases down but literally to infect more people.

This was because Dr. Atlas was a big advocate of the herd immunity idea: infect as many people as possible (except the elderly, including Dr. Atlas, of course), in order to get us to where about 70% of the people had been infected. Of course, the fact that this would require well over a million additional deaths was not a big concern. And as it turns out, it wouldn’t have worked anyway, since people who’ve been infected lose their immunity faster than people who have been vaccinated. And of course, the same crowd that loved the idea of herd immunity before the vaccines came out is now all against trying to achieve herd immunity now (although the bar is much higher at this point), since of course this impinges on “freedom”.

Meaning the freedom to die, of course. At a certain point, I just feel like saying “Great. If you want to die, go ahead. Just do it quickly, so that you don’t infect too many others while you’re still here.”

 

Note that new deaths have fallen in the past week (still over 1,000/day, though), while new cases have risen substantially. One could argue that this doesn’t necessarily mean that deaths will pick up again in a few weeks (which they always have before, with rising cases), since now there are more Covid treatments that greatly lower the chance of death, and since when vaccinated people become infected, they’re much less likely to be hospitalized or die.

However, I saw a headline recently that said about half of Covid cases result in lingering effects, some quite serious (i.e. “long Covid”) and others less so. So even if new Covid deaths were to get close to zero, there would still be lots of people suffering these effects. In other words, the need for vaccination and boosters will remain probably for years, if not forever, since we'll probably never stamp out Covid completely. Hopefully the number of people irrationally opposing Covid vaccination (not just in the US, of course) will decline over the years – perhaps helped along a little by natural selection.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, November 14.

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	98,604	3,181	119%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March	37,945	1,224	55%
Month of April	24,323	811	64%
Month of May	19,843	661	82%
Month of June	10,544	351	53%
Month of July	8,833	287	84%
Month of August	31,160	1,005	351%
Month of Sept.	56,687	1,890	182%
Month of Oct.	49,992	1,613	88%
Total Pandemic so far	784,312	1,257

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 784,312

Average daily deaths last seven days: 1,110

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 1,341

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 1.0%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 48,002,075

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 596,903 (=83,843/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 527,371 (=73,023/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.2%  

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