Covid-19 diary: Part 29

_{Photo by Griffin Wooldridge on Pexels.com.}

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 29, 2021

I have some good news and some bad news about the state of the novel coronavirus pandemic in America.

First, the good news. The rolling-week daily coronavirus death rate has dropped by more than half this month. The moving seven-day per diem of 2,042.9 deaths on Monday, March 1, fell to 983.4 on Saturday, March 27. Only six days saw upticks in the trend, including a minor gain of 0.57 deaths per diem on March 27.

In addition, rolling-week daily new coronavirus diagnoses are also down 8.8 percent from 67,470.4, the national level as of March 1. Monday, March 22, saw the rolling-week daily diagnosis rate fall to 54,052.3. That was the lowest mark since Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, a span of seven months and 10 days.

Now for the bad news.

Five straight days of rising new-case numbers have lifted rolling-week new diagnoses per diem to 61,544.7. That’s an increase of 13.9 percent in less than a week.

We’re still below the level we had at the beginning of the month, but this short-term spike is definitely a move in the wrong direction. It’s also a potential signal that, as I warned on March 20, American states may have prematurely relaxed Covid-19 suppression measures.

There’s more troubling news. The decline in Covid-19 testing that I warned about in that March 20 post has continued. The U.S. has gone from 3.78 tests per 1,000 residents on March 1 to 3.53 tpk (tests per thousand) on March 15 to 2.46 tpk on March 23. Rates haven’t been this low since Sept. 13, 2020. (To find this data, click on the U.S. on the map that appears beneath the headline “How many tests are performed each day?” on this page.)

The fact that daily new case reports are currently climbing even as testing continues to fall is very disturbing.

Even so, we’re not necessarily heading into a deadly fourth wave of the pandemic. Let me explain.

Although we don’t want to see novel coronavirus infections escalate, the most important measure of the pandemic in my eyes is Covid-19 deaths. Saturday’s level would, if maintained over the course of 365 days, yield about 359,000 deaths. That’s a staggering sum, far too high to be accepted by any rational society when mitigation measures are available.

However, I don’t think the death rate will remain stable, because vaccination offers protection against some and possibly all strains of the novel coronavirus. This should lower the death rate, especially if we maintain our pace of more than 2.6 million daily vaccination injections. At this tempo, we can have 70 percent of the population at least partially vaccinated by mid-June and see 90 percent reach that status around nine weeks later.

As more and more people get vaccinated, the pandemic should start to ease. Covid-19-related hospitalizations are down to a little less than 40,000 per day. That’s the level we had in early October, just as the disastrous fall and winter wave was beginning. This is obviously still higher than optimal, but it doesn’t impose the immense demands on staffing and equipment at medical facilities that we saw during the worst periods.

Because hospitals are less crowded, seriously ill Covid-19 patients have a better chance at survival than they would have had in, say, November or January. And severe bouts of Covid-19 seem to be extremely rare in individuals who have been vaccinated.

If in mid- to late April we see daily new Covid-19 cases rise to, say, 70,000, but daily new Covid-19 deaths drop to around 650, I would view that as a promising development — with a few caveats.

Over the course of a full year, such as death rate would still result in more than 237,000 Covid-19 fatalities. While that remains far too high to be acceptable in the long term, any decline in the death rate would of course represent improvement. (Bear in mind that the flu killed roughly 38,000 American patients annually in recent years.)

If the majority of those new cases result in mild infections, in which an individual experiences few serious short-term symptoms and few lasting consequences of the disease, then a somewhat higher case load just might not be much of a problem.

Mind you, I don’t know if this is what is going to happen. If one of the coronavirus mutations proves to be much deadlier or begins to spread explosively, then all bets are off. But if we realize the scenario that I’ve just outlined, with 70,000 daily diagnoses and 650 deaths, it would represent an improvement — even if a somewhat marginal one — from where we stand now.

We’ll have to monitor the death and infection rates and see what kinds of reports we get regarding disease severity. In the meantime, I’d urge everyone to continue to wear masks, wash their hands and social distance.