I’m going to speculate that the infection-to-death interval is getting longer, a lot longer, for those unfortunate enough to take the whole trip. We’re a lot better at managing COVID than in the early days, and the folks dying now (and 2 months from now) are going to be skewing younger as we’ve vaccinated so many of the hard-core elderly.
Right now out in public I’m seeing that precautions are dropping away as fast, or faster, than vaccinations are rising. With the net effect that COVID infections are (probably) getting more prevalent, not less. That’s before we consider any new variants.
I expect this trend to only accelerate as more non-retirement-aged people have been vaccinated for longer and each eventually loses patience and interest in living a curtailed or inconvenienced life.
I don’t find masks or distancing burdensome, so it’s easy for me to do the approved thing almost UFN. There are only a couple of activities I miss and once my vaccination fully takes hold in mid-May I’ll probably restart that stuff at a low level.
I suspect my attitude is a common one among the moderately cautious people. The incautious declared COVID over (or a hoax) a year ago, and the hyper-cautious may rarely leave their homes again.
It looks to me like the CDC graph matches other sources, except the last 7 days’ data is incomplete at the moment. Ignore anything after 3/20 and the chart matches other charts and shows a case rate that’s still quite high @ > 100 per 100k. If cases really dropped off a cliff in the last 7 days, that would be huge news, but I think it’s a statistical blip in that chart.
California seems to be doing better than many states for the moment. There was a report today that the state hit a record low in COVID hospitalizations.
Yes, Brazil is doing absolutely awful. Brazil is where we were in December and January, but with more aggressive variants and more social and cultural resistance and defiance toward risk reduction.
On her show last night (Friday), Rachel Maddow showed a graph of U.S. death rates from COVID for, IIRC, age 75+, and age 65-74. At the start of 2021, the age 75+ group had a death rate of something like 60 people per 100,000; the 65-74 group had a rate of around 16 per 100,000 people. For both of those age groups, the death rate is now under 1 per 100,000 people.
So, this indicates, to me, that the vaccinations are having a huge impact on the mortality rate for the disease among the elderly, which would suggest that the proportion of overall COVID deaths that are among those under 65 has been increasing substantially.
You are welcome! I found the clip; I had gotten the age bands slightly wrong (it was age 80+, and 65-79). In case anyone would like to see it, I have the YouTube video of the show cued up to that segment.
Thanks for the clip; that’s both pretty amazing and very good news. But …
There are a couple of confounders not addressed. Not sharpshooting here, just hoping to find some more info from somebody somewhere.
The graph is of deaths per unit population. From a gross public health perspective that’s a very reasonable measure. But that outcome is composed of two very different statistical factors: infections per unit population and deaths per infection. Each of which has their own list of causes.
Since January only a comparatively tiny number of people have aged into the 80+ cohort versus the number already in it. So we can treat the over 80 cohort as constant and this change is the total result of several different plausible factors (plus a few more I didn’t think of):
Priority vaccination of the elderly and/or caregivers is reducing the number of over 80s getting sick.
Changes in elderly isolation or caregiver employment policies is reducing the number getting sick.
Vaccination of the elderly is reducing the number who, having caught COVID, go on to become seriously ill or die.
Death has already struck (some / most / almost all / ???) of the susceptible ones and who’s left are the ones, like my very aged MIL, who got a mild symptomatic case last April, or who got lucky enough to be uninfected until vaccinated.
The really significant difference is between the bottom item and the others. Are COVID deaths plummeting in the elderly because we're preventing them, or because everyone susceptible enough to die is already dead?
Are we putting out this forest fire or is it fizzling out for lack of fuel to burn?
And what does this say about the future trajectory of the disease for younger cohorts who may have little risk of death, but still have significant risk of “long COVID” and lingering morbidities.
I bet nobody here has answers yet; I sure don’t. But it will be interesting to see them as they emerge from the fog of war.
It seems that these recent surges are a bad combination of virus fatigue and premature celebration in advance of a vaccine that hasn’t fully rolled out, in tandem with some really nasty variants.
#2, I suspect, had already happened well before January of this year, and was probably a key factor in getting the death rate among seniors down from its first peak in the spring of 2020.
Given the timing of the second surge in death rate among seniors (November-January), I wonder if part of it was the result of families getting together for holiday gatherings.
I do suspect that #4 is part of the reason, as well, especially for those seniors in communal living facilities, and those who weren’t willing to take precautions like masks seriously, or who, for whatever reason, weren’t able to socially distance as much as some of their peers (e.g., they had to keep going to the grocery store because they had no one else who could do it for them).
And with @asahi just above. Here in Spring Break Central we see little evidence of any thought about disease among our tourists and snowbirds of any age.
The locals are more sanguine and mask and distancing compliance is high in public. What’s not high is minimizing the amount of time spent out in public indoors for non-essential purposes.
Aye; this is why you don’t celebrate your touchdown before you’re in the end zone. Or your military victory before the peace treaty is signed and in place, etc.