Should you just let Covid happen?

Omicron finally made its mark last week, when new Covid cases jumped by 76% in a single week (vs. -4% last week). The last time new cases rose so much in absolute numbers was in early September. And the last time they jumped by such a huge percentage in one week was…well, it was probably in March or early April of 2020, when new cases were more than doubling each day, and new deaths were almost doubling each day. As I’ve said before, if deaths had continued to increase at those rates, the entire US population would have been dead before my birthday on May 10, 2020. Talk about a downer of a birthday! And yet a lot of people-who-should-know-better, like the WSJ editorial page, now push the story that we overreacted in April 2020 and should never have locked down as much as we did.

New deaths, of course, aren’t increasing at the same rate as new cases, but they jumped by a healthy amount (if “healthy” is the right word), and now we’re over 1,500 a day again. I expect we’ll soon have the governors of Texas, Florida, and North Dakota once more vying to see who can push up their per capita death rate the most. But now the leaders in that fierce contest are Mississippi and Alabama. Nothing like competition!

A lot of people will tell you, “This really isn’t so bad, since Omicron is much less likely to kill you than Delta. That’s absolutely true. On the other hand, given how hugely transmissible Omicron is, there’s no reason to believe total deaths will be any lower this time around. So if I were you, I wouldn’t get vaccinated or wear a mask. Maybe you can be one of the lucky few that still dies! Or maybe your spouse or kids will. Hey, you might not succeed, but you can always try!

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, December 26.

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%

Month of Nov.

38,364

1,279

77%

Total Pandemic so far

819,258

1,271

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 837,854

Average daily deaths last seven days: 1,504

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 1,152

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 1.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 53,222,444

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 1,456,730 (208,104/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 827,323 (118,874/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 2.8% (1.6% last week)

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

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356 th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog ) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here. I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later: Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as pos...
Read more

It’s all about health care

Over the weekend, there were two momentous events in Washington that will undoubtedly have a seriously negative effect on the health (or lack thereof) of the American people. However, just one of these events on its surface seems to be about healthcare. In this post, I will discuss the one that doesn’t seem to be about healthcare, but actually is. Barring some unforeseen development before then, in my next post I’ll discuss the other event. The former event was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and Mitch McConnell’s immediate (i.e. about 1 ½ hours after her passing was announced) announcement that he would push through Trump’s nominee before the election – assuming four Republican Senators don’t block that process. Why is this event about healthcare? Because the Supreme Court is set to decide in December a case that would literally overturn Obamacare and cause more than 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage in the middle of a pandemic.   The case is based on a ...
Read more

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more