The Pandemic Blog

It would be nice to say this is The Year We Defeated Covid, but that’s certainly not true. In fact, if you look at the deaths numbers below, you’ll see that, after a terrible first three months, average daily deaths for April through November have all been in the 300-550 range, and haven’t exhibited any trend. However, the last three weeks have exhibited a trend, and it’s…up. The fact is that, as long as there are so many infections (although I don’t pay much attention to the official numbers, since probably the majority of Covid cases are never reported), more new variants will arise. And successful new variants don’t spring out of the blue; they owe their success to the fact that they can be transmitted much easier. More infections = more deaths. Of course, there’s always vaccination. And if you haven’t received the latest booster and you’re over the age of say 5, shame on you. You (or your grieving family members) will feel pretty stupid if you end up being hospitalized or wor

WaPo and other papers carried the grim news this morning that US life expectancy fell again in 2021, despite the many efforts to declare the pandemic “over” last year. Covid deaths were up over 2020, but they were joined by higher drug overdose deaths, in large part due to fentanyl. All progress made in raising life expectancy since 1996 has been erased. To quote WaPo, this is “a dismal benchmark for a reliable measure of health that should rise steadily in an affluent, developed nation.” Yes, it should. And life expectancy did rise last year in many other affluent countries, although not all. But the US remains by far the leader in what I call obstinacy-motivated Covid deaths: deaths of people who are unvaccinated and unwilling to follow masking and other public health guidelines. Plus, that obstinacy seems to be continuing, since only about 14% of the eligible US population has received the Omicron-focused booster shot that came out earlier this fall – which has been proven to sig