The Pandemic Blog

You have probably read that Michigan is getting hammered by the “UK variant” of the coronavirus; for example, 9 of the top 10 metropolitan areas with the highest numbers of new Covid cases are in Michigan. You may also have read that Gov. Whitmer has requested of the Biden administration that Michigan get extra doses of the vaccines, at the expense of other states. And that the administration has turned her down on this request, affirming they’ll continue to distribute doses based on each state’s population. It’s easy to feel sympathetic with the Governor. It’s likely that getting more vaccines would have helped alleviate the strain on hospitals, and even prevented some deaths. However, the fact is that vaccines aren’t the best way to fight a short-term surge. The best way is social distancing and mask-wearing, the same as they were last March. Unfortunately, Michigan, like most other states, has decided it’s over with the pandemic and isn’t even contemplating implementing these ...

On first glance, it might seem like we’re doing pretty well. Daily new cases and new deaths were both down in March, and of course we all know that vaccinations in the US are well ahead of what almost anyone was predicting a couple of months ago. On the other hand, Michigan is getting absolutely hammered by the British variant, and it’s inevitable that that variant will surge across the country in the very near future. The good thing about the British variant is that the vaccines approved today seem to be effective against it, although once again – just like a year ago! – a lack of testing capacity is hampering the CDC’s ability to track this variant. This time, the testing in question is genetic sequencing, which is required in order to distinguish one variant from another. But the bad news is what’s going on in South America. Brazil has been devastated by the variant that first appeared in the city of Manaus and then spread to the whole country. I read a day or two ago that 100...

There were some news stories this weekend, stating that new Covid cases had started increasing again. That’s true, but this doesn’t yet constitute a turnaround. Here are the average daily new cases for the first four weeks of February (ending on Sundays): 63,669, 54,373, 62,874 and 63,004. In other words, new cases jumped up two weeks ago, and in the past week they increased a little more. We’re now more or less back where we were at the beginning of the month. But again, these numbers are far too high, period. We didn’t have 63,000 average daily new cases ever until last summer, and there was about a one-month period when they were mostly a little above that level. Then they went down as the second wave receded. As the third wave hit, they passed 63,000 last October 15, and never went below that again until two weeks ago. With daily deaths still over 1,000, we’re nowhere near finished with the pandemic. Meanwhile, the UK variant is increasingly found in the US. The CDC said a coup...

  Note from Tom: My email feed didn't seem to work on Monday, so those of you who read my posts in the emails didn't see this post . I think it's pretty interesting, so you might want to look at it now. Since I’m now updating my numbers every seven days, I was struck – but not terribly surprised – to see that the decline in the growth rate of new total Covid cases turned around last week. The weekly growth rate was 1.3% a week ago, but is now up to 1.5%. And the absolute new case numbers are more striking: In the last seven days new cases averaged 62,874 a day, vs. 54,373 in the previous week. Of course, this is just one week, so it’s not in itself too much cause for worry. However, the first time when daily new cases even reached this level was October 15. At the time, that seemed like a very worrisome sign. And it definitely was, since one month later, on Nov. 15, there were 147,000 new cases, on Dec. 15 there were 201,000, and on Jan. 15 there were 248,000. Of course, it...