The Pandemic Blog

There’s been no trend in the Covid deaths numbers since April. They’ve been hanging in the 400-600 deaths per day range. This is better than before, to be sure, but it’s still an alarming level. Normal flu deaths over the last decade would be in the 80-140/day range. Don’t let anyone tell you this is no worse than the flu. And the reason is almost entirely the huge percentage of unvaccinated people in the US population. When I checked a month ago, the chances of an unvaccinated person catching Covid and ultimately dying as a result were 16 times the chances of a fully vaccinated and boosted person. And those were average numbers. When you move up the age range, the likelihood of dying increases almost exponentially, so that the chance of an unvaccinated person who is 85 or older who catches covid of dying from it are at least 300 times that of a vaccinated person. As if there weren’t already enough problems with getting old. The numbers These numbers were updated based on those r...

Fortunately, neither Covid cases nor Covid deaths have changed very much in the last month or so. Deaths are currently varying in the 350-550/day range, which is a lot better than the 1400-2000 range they were in at this time last year (as the Delta variant firmly took hold) – but still many times more than the flu, which is what some misinformed people say Covid is now comparable to. Will we ever get back in the 1400-2000 range again? I hope not, but it’s important to remember that deaths have nowhere to go but up as the weather gets colder. The big difference from last year is that we now seem to be following Wayne Gretzky’s advice and skating toward where the puck is going, not where it’s been. It seems the new Omicron-specific boosters are a Godsend, since for the last 11 months or so, Omicron and its unruly children have been ruling the roost in the Covid variant world – and that may continue. For the first time, you can be vaccinated against likely new variants (the Omicron fam...