Covid-19 diary: Part 27

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 19, 2021

Nearly every day since Dec. 3, 2020, one of the first things I’ve done in the morning has been to check Covid-19 trends and tweet about them. This grew out of my interest in comparing the pandemic death toll to those of other disasters in American history. (Click on the following links for the second, third and fourth posts in this series.) That pursuit prompted me to construct multiple spreadsheets. One of these regularly imports daily data from The New York Times and until recently also pulled daily records from the now-discontinued COVID Tracking Project.

I’m not an expert, but I do think that I have a general handle on what’s happening with the pandemic in the United States.

New cases have been declining pretty steadily since Jan. 8, when we saw a single-day report of 300,619 diagnoses and a rolling seven-day per diem of 259,570.7 diagnoses, both records. As of Tuesday, the rolling seven-day per diem case load had fallen 78.8 percent, to 54,954.4. The track of Covid-19 deaths has been a bit rockier, but as of Tuesday, the rolling seven-day per diem toll had declined to 1,302.9 lives lost, a 61.1 percent dropoff from Jan. 12’s peak of 3,351.7. We’ve got a ways to go, but this is great news. (You can see these trends by looking at the bar charts on this New York Times page, updated daily.)

Johns Hopkins University reports that Covid-19 hospitalizations are down from a peak of 128,311 the week of Jan. 1 to 40,020 as of the week of March 5. (Click on the button labeled inpatient capacity to find these figures on the weekly hospitalization trends page.) This is also great news!

The outlook on vaccinations is similarly positive, with a rolling-week average of around 2.5 million shots being administered each day. The United States has fully vaccinated nearly 12 percent of the population, the 11th-highest rate in the world. With more than 39 million fully vaccinated residents, the U.S. has far outpaced the world’s second-best performer in absolute terms, India, where only 6.5 million residents have complete protection.

So why am I still worried about Covid-19?

There are a few different answers to this question. One is that I’m a natural worrier, and someone who finds microscopic threats especially disturbing to boot.

Another is that the United States, along with many other Western nations, has prematurely dropped its guard before during the pandemic. We saw a lot of the nation abandon social distancing restrictions and other protective policies in the summer, which contributed to a surge of cases and deaths in July.

October figures exceeded the summertime national spike in cases and deaths. The fall rise was partly a function of colder weather forcing Americans to spend more time indoors.

But things only got worse from there: Millions of Americans ignored expert warnings against holding holiday get-togethers in November and December, which lifted cases and deaths to unprecedented heights. Today, despite two months of declines, daily deaths are equivalent to what the U.S. saw in mid-November and daily diagnoses are around the level we had in mid-October.

^{Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com.}

So as various states lift occupancy restrictions on gymnasiums, restaurants, bars and other public gathering spots, and as Texas and Mississippi cancel mask mandates and other restrictions altogether, I can’t help but worry that feckless leaders and exhausted citizens are paving the way for a resurgence of the novel coronavirus.

A third cause for worry is that we just don’t know how effective vaccines will be against emerging variants of the novel coronavirus. The early returns are mixed. A recent study in South Africa showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine doesn’t guard against one mutation. On the other hand, some authorities believe that even vaccines that show decreased effectiveness against new strains “still might be sufficient to protect against COVID-19, or at least severe COVID-19.”

A fourth concern is that a significant chunk of the population is skeptical of the new vaccines. A recent poll showed that nearly half of Trump voters would turn down an opportunity to get vaccinated, as opposed to 10 percent of Biden voters. Sixty-one percent of African-Americans told Pew Research in mid-February that they were willing to be vaccinated, as opposed to 69 percent of whites, 70 percent of Hispanics and 91 percent of English-speaking Asian-Americans.

I believe that around 70 percent of Americans are likely to be fully vaccinated by the end of summer, and perhaps sooner. With major outreach, that figure could eventually rise to 80 percent; 90 percent might be attainable with a Herculean effort. But we don’t yet know if 70 percent or even 80 percent will be enough to promote herd immunity.

Which brings me to another issue: How long will vaccine protections last? If they run out in a matter of months, we might need a whole new campaign to administer hundreds of millions of booster shots.

There’s still so much we don’t know about Covid-19, the virus that causes it and the new strains that have emerged and are continuing to be created.

My sixth concern may be both the most important and most immediate of all the reasons why I’m still worried about the pandemic: We may not be conducting enough Covid-19 tests. By one estimate, testing declined nearly a quarter between Feb. 1 and March 15. And this development has the potential to undermine all the gains that the U.S. seems to be making in the pandemic.

Bruce Y. Lee, a New York University professor of health policy and management who specializes in math and computer modeling, explained the issue this way to Vox reporter Umair Irfan: “The effectiveness of vaccines or effectiveness of masks, all those things really depend on how well you contain the virus, and all that depends on knowledge of where the virus is spreading, and all that depends on testing.”

So am I still worried about Covid-19, even with all the positive trends that we seem to be seeing? You’re damn right I am.