The Pandemic Blog

The Times produced a great article this week about events at the CDC in early March 2020. Some staffers were in despair over the novel coronavirus. Of course, the whole world knew it could be deadly, and it was already clear it had appeared in the US. But this didn’t cause their despair, since the CDC had dealt successfully with deadly viruses before. The formula was tried and true: You quarantine anyone who has symptoms of being infected, as well as anyone who has been in close contact with an infected person. However, these CDC staff members, as well as others in Europe (and probably some in China), had learned that the virus could spread asymptomatically. In other words, there would now be no way to quarantine everyone who was infected, since they themselves wouldn’t know they were infected until they started experiencing symptoms. But even this realization didn’t cause them to despair, since it would just be another obstacle to overcome, not the end of the fight. The cause o

The Wall Street Journal published a good article recently, summarizing where the US stands in terms of the Covid death rate. Here are the main points it makes: 1.       The death rate remains at 400 per week, which is almost exactly what it’s been since March 2022. Not going up, but certainly not going down, either. 2.       The number of “excess deaths” (i.e. deaths above what would normally be expected at this time of the year) is more than would be expected from just looking at the Covid death rate. A clue why this might be the case is the fact that Covid is listed as a contributing cause in many cases of heart disease and cancer (the two leading causes of death, with Covid holding its own at number 3, thank you very much). So, if you do catch Covid (especially if you’re old), be sure to hope that you don’t develop heart disease or cancer. 3.       Older people are most likely to die (of course that’s always been the case, except during the Delta wave, when it seems younge