The Pandemic Blog

Note that the number of new cases last week, 430,000, is more than double what it was just two weeks previous to that, and close to 200,000 more than the previous week. So coronavirus cases are definitely turning up again (of course, with the much greater use of home testing, these numbers are very low compared to what they would have been a year ago, although hopefully the week-to-week comparisons are still usable). Average daily deaths haven’t turned up, but for the last three weeks the number has been almost exactly the same: about 476. It remains to be seen whether they’ll start climbing again. It’s disappointing that we can’t seem to get lower than that number, since we were at less than 300 a day last July. Philip Bump, an excellent center-right columnist with WaPo , published a good column last week, which showed that about a quarter of total US pandemic deaths (i.e. over 250,000) were probably preventable by vaccination. And since vaccines only became widely available la

Last week, the Times reported that the WHO, having undertaken a comprehensive inventory of worldwide deaths that can be attributed to Covid (and this includes going through a lot more than government mortality statistics, which are unreliable in a lot of the world), now believes that 15 million is the number so far . This compares with the official figure of 6 million, based on the statistics published by the individual governments. And what country do they say is the world leader (both as a source of deaths and as an under-reporter)? India. That country has officially reported 520,000 deaths, but the WHO reportedly believes the true figure is 4 million. Given the horrible stories that were coming out of India about a year ago, this isn’t terribly surprising. Do you remember the thousands of bodies of people dumped in rivers like the Ganges, because their families couldn’t afford the cost of the wood needed to cremate them? So India leads the world in total deaths. However, in de