The Pandemic Blog

Three of the national numbers I track are slowly moving the right way. For example, the test positive rate keeps trending down. It’s at 5.9% now, vs. 8.5% at its July peak and 21.9% at its April peak. But we’re still averaging over 1,000 deaths a day, as you can see below. But the one number that isn’t trending down now is probably the most important one – the number of daily new cases. It’s down from its peak of about 60,000 on August 14, and it hit a low of about 33,000 on August 23. Since then, it’s been going back up, and it was at 49,000 yesterday. There’s a long way to go before the Trump administration’s statements that we’ve actually beaten the novel coronavirus will prove true – and there’s still the likelihood that there will be another big wave of infections and deaths in the fall, and that school reopenings will seed a lot of local outbreaks, as happened in Israel. Also, no country ever “beats” the virus. Vietnam and New Zealand have shown that months of zero n...

Since the very beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic in the US, the Trump administration has never come up with a comprehensive plan for dealing with the virus. In early April, Trump made noises to the effect that he had a plan and he would solve the whole problem. But within a week or two, his tone changed completely: The virus response isn’t a federal responsibility, but that of the states. So if you want to know what’s being done to combat the virus, just ask the governors. Of course, this “strategy” hasn’t worked terribly well, since it led to the lockdowns then in effect (which were driven by the states, of course, but only some states) in many cases being lifted prematurely, with the inevitable second wave hitting in June and July. Now, we’re slowly coming down from the peak of that wave (yesterday, there were 47,000 new cases, which is a far cry from the low of around 20,000 a day a couple months ago. And even 20,000 new cases a day is – ahem! – astronomical in compariso...