Where are you seeing that? On 91-divoc Michigan seems above the national average and moving up.
And the national average seems in a bit of a hold at the moment
I stand corrected – only a few days ago the death rate appeared to be in decline, but it looks like that might be changing after all. The number of new cases had been plateauing for some time.
Yeah, I’ve been straining every single day to see some effect, any effect on the numbers from vaccinations, and I come up empty, every single day. I mean, it can be hard to discern a trend when you’re at the start of one, but the curves just laugh at my hopeful discernment so far.
A comment I made upthread or elsewhere, I forget which. …
IMO the public at large is dropping precautions at least as fast as they’re vaccinating. The net effect is to keep the death and infection counts more or less constant while reducing the inconvenience and increasing the patronage at bars, movies, etc.
What I saw last week suggested that in spite of plateaus in terms of the new cases, the death rate was still declining. That is not the case anymore, though. Within the last 2-3 days, deaths have increased. No doubt, the reopenings have factored, but also the new variants have factored as well.
We’re no longer dealing with original COVID; we’re dealing with her new and improved descendants.
What we’ve seen is the data is noisy. You picked out two literally opposite trends in two weeks. It’s like seeing faces in clouds, you want order to appear. Hey, so do I.
I could be wrong, but what I suspect is that the death rate from COVID has continued to decline. This was a trend that started even before the vaccinations; the vaccines made the death rate and thus the number of deaths decline relative to the number of new infections. When the cases rose initially, the deaths continued their decline but now that we’ve been seeing a surge in case numbers, we’re now, weeks later, beginning to see the deaths.
But within the same time from - the last month or so - the variants are starting to overtake ‘regular’ COVID. We’re also about to find out how effective our vaccines truly are.
By this point, everyone’s got their PhDs in amateur epidemiology, at the very least!
What about the UK variant? What’s happening in England? I thought every variant was supposed to be extra infectious and extra deadly.
The “war” has been going on for a while now, and I think the rumor mill and clickbait are ramping up for a second wave. I think we just need to work on things day by day. There is still so much we don’t know about viruses.
135,314,394 total cases
2,928,781 dead
108,868,194 recovered
In the US:
31,802,772 total cases
574,840 dead
24,346,766 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
There’s talk of how to use vaccine passports. I think they should devise ways to determine who’s had the opportunity to get vaccinated and deliberately refused. Those who refuse vaccines and carry on, and who then come down with COVID, should not be treated. They should be forced into home confinement. Either they survive, or they die. Survival of the fittest.
Why don’t you go try to force people into their home on your own. See who survives.
Moderating
Let’s drop this hijack. It doesn’t belong in the breaking news thread.
Colibri
QZ Moderator
I’ve been looking at my state’s data by age band, which is only published once a week. In my state, it looks very much like the recent increase has been entirely among the 20-29 crowd, very few of whom have been vaccinated. Rates among those over 65 were declining prior to the recent increases, and continued to drift slowly down. Rates among the 50-64 set started to rise, but then stopped rising and now may be dipping. Rates among those 30-49 and 0-19 are drifting slightly up, but rates among those 20-29 are up sharply.
Note that in my state the 75+ cohort are mostly fully vaccinated, and more than 80% of those 65-74 have at least one dose. The inflection in infection rates of the 50-64 cohort are approximately timed when that cohort hit 30% with a first dose.
(I don’t want to say where i live, but i suspect that many states publish this data, and you can look up your state. Or look up any state with a relatively high vaccine uptake.)
So i am hopeful that the pandemic will recede as more younger people get vaccinated. But anxious about news of vaccine hesitancy in many states.
Quoting myself for context:
Ref the folks in the last few posts, a corrollary to my contention and your observations about the recent data may be that, at least in the USA, we have found the death rate / annual death toll that society as a whole is comfortable ignoring. Just as they are used to flu and bad driving killing ~30K/yr each, and smoking killing ~600K/yr it may be that the current loss rate from COVID has become normalized.
If this process hasn’t happened fully yet, I do believe that it will happen in the next few months. At some level that’s well above zero, but may be either more or (more likely) a bit less than what we’re experiencing today.
And yes, the “No vax for pwecious me” crowd will ensure that as a matter of epidemiology the “socially acceptable” loss rate settles vastly higher than it needs to be.
More infectious, but not necessarily more deadly. I think I’ve only seen one report of a mutant lineage being more deadly, but I can’t remember which one.
Note that there are more lineages than we read about in the news. The others don’t get reported because they’re not more infectious or more deadly.
Aye; this is what I’m seeing: people are mostly okay with the current situation.
There will certainly be a level of covid deaths that we consider unavoidable (or not worth avoiding) but i don’t think we are there yet, at least not in my state.
A more open access source for what appears to be the same story:
These two papers (which I have not yet had a chance to look through) appear to be the source material:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104882?query=featured_home
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104840?query=featured_home
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136,020,767 total cases
2,939,234 dead
109,372,359 recovered
In the US:
31,869,980 total cases
575,593 dead
24,423,589 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Today is the 3rd-largest single day new case total worldwide yet, behind only 7 & 8 January of this year.