The Pandemic Blog

Today, WaPo ran a story pointing out the contrast between this Memorial Day and last year’s. The main difference? The reported Covid infection numbers are five times higher this year than last. And that understates the difference, since home testing was almost nonexistent then, yet it’s widespread now. How many cases identified at home get reported? Nobody knows, but I doubt it’s even 50%. So the actual cases are more than five times higher this year than last, perhaps ten times higher. What’s the main similarity between now and then? Widespread optimism that we’ve got this thing beaten. And was the optimism justified last year? Yes it was…at first. The whole month of July, daily deaths averaged below 300. But then they started growing again to 1-2,000 a day late in the year, as Delta took hold. Then they averaged over 2,000 a day this past January, due to Omicron (remember Omicron? That mild disease that wasn't going to kill anybody? As it was revealed this week, it took a ...

  For once, the weekly numbers were a surprise to me, since they show both new cases and new deaths declining – although I always have to point out that the current level of deaths is the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every day. Something tells me we wouldn’t be so blasé about that, even when we considered that one crash a day was a lot better than more than ten crashes a day at the height of the pandemic. Of course, nowadays there’s a lot of peer pressure to catch Covid. After all, people say, more than half of Americans (two thirds?) have survived Covid infection at least once. It can’t be that bad. And having been infected could actually increase your immunity, even if you’ve already had four doses. What’s there to lose? A lot, as it turns out. An article in the Chicago Tribune this week states that up to 30% of people who experience Covid may experience long Covid. Another statement in the same article – from a Northwestern University study – said that long Covi...