Still “Fixin’ to die”

 

…There ain’t no time to wonder why…Whoopee!..We’re all gonna’ die.”

Country Joe and the Fish, “Fixin’ to die rag”

In the June issue of Scientific American (a publication I’ve subscribed to for at least 20 years and read religiously), there was a good commentary piece titled “One Million Dead from COVID is Not Normal”. The identical article was published online in February. You can find it here.

The most powerful statement in both articles is this one: “In May 2020 the New York Times ran a sympathetic headline reading ‘U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,’ using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. But when the death toll reached nine times that number, the Times callously wrote, ‘900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On’.”

Surely, you’ve heard of the New York Times, that staunchly conservative paper that always parrots the current GOP line? This quote shows that the pandemic looked very different to that paper in May 2020 than it did in January of this year (when we passed 900,000 deaths). In May 2020 the refrigerator trucks were still backing up to hospitals in New York City and even crematories had waiting lists; daily Covid deaths were around 1,300.

But this January, even though deaths averaged over 2,000 a day due to the ferocious surge of omicron (the variant that is still the dominant one today, although its subvariants are competing with each other and one-by-one grabbing the prize for most transmissible, like a bunch of unruly children fighting to be first in the lunch line), the Times and many Americans were quite willing to follow the sardonic advice that Sen. George Aiken had provided regarding the Vietnam War: “Declare victory and leave” (in fact, that was exactly what the US ended up doing, with predictable results)

So what had changed between May 2020 and January 2022? For one thing, in May 2020, about 18% of Covid cases ended in death (that percentage was 42% in late March 2020, when I first started tracking the number). I stopped following that number last fall, when it had declined to 2% (it’s almost certainly fallen further since then). This was mostly due to the fact that vaccination, while it doesn’t prevent infection - at least against omicron and its variants – greatly reduces the likelihood that someone will die if they catch Covid; in fact, almost everyone who died of Covid in the beginning of this year was unvaccinated.

Even today, someone who hasn’t been vaccinated and catches Covid is 23 times more likely to die of it than someone who has been fully vaccinated and received two boosters. However, I know that a lot of people who are firmly against vaccination won’t even care about that number. They’ll point out that the likelihood of death has fallen greatly for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people who catch Covid.

That’s true, but you have to remember this: As I pointed out last week, current new Covid cases are 14 times higher than they were a year ago; in fact, that was also the case in January (and that makes no allowance for the huge prevalence of home testing now, which just about never gets reported). If your chances of dying if you get sick (regardless of vaccination status) are about 1/10 of what they were last year (which was the CDC’s estimate in January), but the chance that you’ll get sick is much more than 14 times higher than it was last year, this means the probability that anyone will catch Covid and die is still much more than four times higher than it was last year.

Given that we’re in the summer lull, when cases and deaths drop due to people being outdoors much more, it’s easy to think we’ve beaten the virus and we’re on the way out of the pandemic. While there’s certainly a small possibility that could be true, it’s more likely that the same thing will happen this fall that happened last year: People will start spending more time indoors with other people and more people will get sick and die. We’ll more likely be back above 1,000 daily deaths as we head into winter and even higher death rates (the worst months of both 2021 and 2022 were January and February).

The SciAm article asks, “Is it rational to ignore high community viral loads in American society and to not do more to lower them so that fewer people are exposed, become sick, transmit onward and possibly die?” Since we’re clearly not going to do anything to lower viral loads until forced to by another deadly wave of Covid (and since Biden’s CDC seems to be as eager to accommodate the people who don’t want to do anything about Covid as did Trump’s CDC, although at least Trump’s CDC can argue they were forced to take that position. Biden’s CDC can’t even use that excuse), we’ve decided to answer this question by trying it and seeing what happens. Not the best course of action, in my opinion.

The numbers

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

Month	Deaths reported during month/year	Avg. deaths per day during month/year	Deaths as percentage of previous month/year
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April 2020	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May 2020	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June 2020	23,925	798	57%
Month of July 2020	26,649	860	111%
Month of August 2020	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept. 2020	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct. 2020	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov. 2020	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec. 2020	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,604	3,181	119%
Month of Feb. 2021	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March 2021	37,945	1,224	55%
Month of April 2021	24,323	811	64%
Month of May 2021	19,843	661	82%
Month of June 2021	10,544	351	53%
Month of July 2021	8,833	287	84%
Month of August 2021	31,160	1,005	351%
Month of Sept. 2021	56,687	1,890	182%
Month of Oct. 2021	49,992	1,613	88%
Month of Nov. 2021	38,364	1,279	77%
Month of Dec. 2021	41,452	1,337	108%
Total 2021	492,756	1,350	158%
Month of Jan. 2022	65,855	2,124	159%
Month of Feb. 2022	63,451	2,266	96%
Month of March 2022	31,427	1,014	50%
Month of April 2022	13,297	443	42%
Month of May 2022	11,474	370	86%
Month of June 2022	11,109	370	97%
Month of July 2022	11,903	384	107%
Total Pandemic so far	1,062,658	1,223

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,062,658

Average daily deaths last seven days: 428

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 596

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 94,750,457             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 650,077 (92,868)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 908,380 (129,769/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.7% (1.0% last week)

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