The Pandemic Blog

Some observations from this week’s numbers: 1.       New cases are increasing at the highest rate since early February. 2.       New deaths certainly aren’t going down, but it’s too early to say they’re trending up. Even then, 370 deaths a day would be a catastrophe, if they had any other cause (say, mass shootings or airline crashes). 3.       We’re averaging 826,419 new cases a day, vs. 256,044 a year ago. And that doesn’t include cases identified by home testing. Plus, given that the incidence of vaccination hasn’t increased at all since last year (see last week’s post ) and about 100% of the people being hospitalized and dying are unvaccinated, this means that we can’t look for salvation from vaccinations. I was in a group yesterday that was discussing online whether to have an in-person meeting in September. The consensus was not to risk it. In fact, my guess is a lot of in-person meetings scheduled for the fall will end up going back online, even before it is certain wh

The numbers definitely improved this past week, but it’s still important to compare them with last year at this time: 1.       In the week ending June 20, 2021, there were 82,754 new Covid cases reported. Last week, 554,067 new cases were reported. And this is with a big undercount of new cases, since there was very little home testing available last summer and this year there’s lots of it. I doubt any but a small fraction of cases identified at home are reported (in fact, in Illinois it seems there’s no way at all to officially report new cases) – until the person sees a doctor or is hospitalized. 2.       Of course, some people will say, “Remember, the current Omicron sub-variants are much less deadly than the Delta variant last year.” That’s true. On the other hand, if you have ten times as many cases as last year (which is probably an undercount of the actual situation), they would have to be much less than one tenth as deadly, in order to leave the death numbers the same as la