The Pandemic Blog

A few days ago, the Washington Post published this article about a Korean study “that suggests the virus, under certain airflow conditions, travels farther than six feet and can infect others in as little as five minutes.” I’ll let you read the details, but the study does show that maintaining six feet between tables in itself isn’t adequate. A person was infected by another person who was 21 feet away from them. And the first person was infected within five minutes of the second person sitting down, since the first person left the restaurant at that point. Of course, this isn’t a definitive study with thousands of restaurants and identical conditions – that simply isn’t possible. But anyone who would reject this study for that reason is a fool, IMHO. You might still go to restaurants, but that’s your own decision based on your personal risk factors for the disease and the likelihood that you might yourself already be infected. But you shouldn’t just ignore this study. And neither...

There were three hugely important news items yesterday, two of which got lots of press and the third very little. The first was the news that President Trump’s efforts to use the courts are at a dead end. The US Supreme Court dismissed the very strange lawsuit from the state of Texas, asking that the election results in four other states be thrown out because they somehow offended Texans. The court did this in a one-sentence statement that essentially said “What is this s___??” Of course, this won’t end Trump’s grousing about the election results, which will undoubtedly continue for years. But it does leave Trump in an interesting quandry: He has known all along that he had zero chance of overturning the election, but he realized that his efforts to do so – using a ragtag and discredited legal team that without a doubt didn’t cost much – were a wonderful fundraising opportunity for his new Save America PAC. In fact, of the more than $150 million that Trump raised by emails between...

My post two days ago discussed the fact that New Mexico had developed a plan with its hospitals to ration healthcare when and if the hospitals are all completely full. The Democratic governor is one of the sensible governors who actually believes that the health of her state’s citizens shouldn’t take second place to following a discredited ideology that has gotten us in the mess. She was pleading with New Mexicans not to drop their efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus. Two weeks ago, New Mexico implemented some of the most restrictive anti-coronavirus policies in the country, as new cases were growing exponentially. In today’s Washington Post, an article points out that the state did activate the plan. But it also points out that this might not necessarily lead to New Mexicans dying because they were denied care. This is because, over the past two weeks, new cases have fallen by a third – obviously because of the measures the governor put in place. The test positive ra...

I just heard a discussion on NPR about the fact that New Mexico’s governor yesterday said the state had readied a plan for hospital bed rationing and might have to put it into effect soon if admissions rise. The person commenting on the report said that, since hospital ICUs are essentially full in a lot of states, rationing might soon come to a hospital and state near you. I have news for this person: Rationing is here. As this story in WaPo by Dr. Ashish Jha pointed out on Monday, the hospitalization rate for Covid patients is dropping across the country, and that’s bad news. Of course, this might sound counter intuitive. We’ve all been told that an increase or decrease in positive test numbers (i.e. cases) leads in one week to a similar increase or decrease in hospitalizations. And 2-3 weeks after hospitalizations increase or decrease, deaths follow suit. So why isn’t it good news that hospitalizations are dropping? For one thing, new cases aren’t dropping at all. A week ago, th...

I just updated my spreadsheet for the first time in four days. I was absolutely astounded at how much worse the numbers were: 1.       My projection for Covid deaths in December jumped from 58,000 to 79,000. 2.       This entailed an increase in the average daily number of deaths from 1,901 to 2,577, which is two deaths every minute. 3.       The 7-day growth rate in deaths jumped from 4.3% to 5.8%. 4.       The 7-day growth rate in cases went from 8.9% to 10.2%. 5.       Here’s the most frightening change of all: The test positivity rate jumped from 10.2% to 28.5%. I read this morning that the US is likely to have 540,000 deaths by April. However, I think that’s wildly optimistic. If we just keep adding 80,000 deaths per month, as we will likely do in December, we’ll have 320,000 more deaths in January through April. This means we’ll have 670,000 tota...