The Pandemic Blog

There’s been a lot written about the fact that six in ten Covid deaths are now among vaccinated people. Does this mean that vaccines don’t work? Obviously, if that’s true, it fits in very nicely with a certain political narrative (not mine, to be sure). However, my college roommate Mike Howard, just retired as a philosophy professor at the University of Maine, sent me the link to this article, which explains why more detailed analysis of the numbers shows just the opposite: that being vaccinated and boosted provides the best protection possible from dying if you catch Covid. Here are a few of the reasons why this is the case: First, older people are much more likely to be vaccinated than younger people, and they’re also much more likely to die if they get Covid. That in itself gives a big bias to the numbers. The real question is how many more older people would die if they weren’t vaccinated, and the answer is clearly “a whole lot”. Second, if you’ve been vaccinated but have...

Since early April 2022, as we were coming down from the huge Omicron deaths numbers of January through March, US Covid deaths have varied within a tight range of 250-600 per day (with the great majority of weeks falling in the 300-450 range). Since even this range is too high (flu deaths are on average less than 100 per day), I’ve been looking for the numbers to go below 250 – and stay below that for some time – before I’ll say the pandemic is over in the US. I have good news and bad news. The good news is we’ve finally broken out of the range! But the bad news is we’ve broken out of the top of the range, not the bottom. Last week, there were an average of 625 deaths per day. Of course, this might be a transient phenomenon. But unless we suddenly go back to the bottom of the range and stay there, I’m not going to say the pandemic is over (even though Joe Biden did last fall. This was great fodder for the GOP, since this wasn’t an official government declaration. If the pandemic we...