Could be warming weather. This virus may not like it when it’s too cold any more than it does when it’s too hot. Or at least, that would be an interesting hypothesis to explore.
Except it’s been much colder in the Northern Hemisphere until about Sunday.
Just a wild thought, but is there any change in cosmic activity that might explain it? Perhaps an increase in cosmic radiation, solar flares, or something similar might degrade the virus in some way.
That would make sense. Since the vaccine is a microchip, the virus is probably at least part microchip. Microchips that aren’t insulated can be sensitive to cosmic radiation.
That’s funny, but I didn’t mean it in that way. Cosmic radiation can damage DNA. It’s seems plausible that the DNA in the aerosolized virus particles might be damaged if there was increased radiation.
Nitpick: I believe COVID is RNA, not DNA.
It’s not warming worldwide. Looking at the various graphs on this page, it would be difficult to definitively say which countries are in the Southern vs. Northern hemisphere, and which countries are basically warm all the time.
I doubt cosmic radiation would have an effect, but maybe the increased sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere.
But when you at it by another regional breakdown, it’s still following the same trends, though the numbers aren’t identical, of course. Though that’s a couple weeks old, so it may look different now.
I think this is a better presentation. It shows each region separately. If you view each country separately, the trends are even more different. So, there’s a first surge in Spring; US, India, and Latin America had a Summer surge; Europe and America had huge Fall surges but months apart. Since the US was significantly involved in all three surges, the general shape of world cases, mirrors the US.
USA! USA! We’re number ONE!! We’re number ONE!! 
Antarctica and Oceania cases excluded as too low to register on scale
Yep, we are proved to be an absolute failure at this global pandemic business.
That’s informative, thanks.
(Edited by @puzzlegal to fix formatting)
If testing actually has only captured 1/5th of cases and there really have 120 million cases in the US, and we’ve vaccinated 46 million people, we might be approaching herd immunity.
Nope.
The US population is ~330 million, so your numbers are just a little over 50%. HI doesn’t kick in until at least 80% Still a long way to go.
Plus, it seems that immunity acquired through infection fades over time, so those infected at the beginning are unlikely to still have an immune response.
Herd immunity isn’t something that “kicks in” all at once. If 50% of the population is immune, then you’ll have 50% lower instantaneous infection rates. If the disease has an R0 of greater than 2, then that’ll leave it still in epidemic status, but it’s a lot better than the baseline.
And that actually understates it, because you don’t have all the population mixing uniformly. Some subpopulations are, for various reasons, at higher risk of infection. Those subpopulations would account for more than their share of the people who have been infected so far, and their subsequent immunity would also have a greater part in reducing further cases.
Everyone always says that this might be the case, but the only evidence anyone ever seems to produce that it is the case is citing a lot of people who say that it might be the case.
That global decline shows signs of leveling off. In the past week, new cases have plateaued at about 400k cases a day. Too soon to say for sure, though.
Similar plateau in the US, too, circa 70k cases a day now
The chart at this link shows dramatic increases in Texas and mostly level or declining everywhere else. It looks like the wild improvement phase is over, unfortunately.
This is the point I was trying to make. The term “herd immunity” has a specific definition
Herd immunity occurs when enough people become immune to a disease to make its spread unlikely. As a result, the entire community is protected, even those who are not themselves immune. Herd immunity is usually achieved through vaccination, but it can also occur through natural infection.
[For Covid-19]Experts initially estimated that somewhere between 60% and 70% of the population needs to be immune in order to achieve herd immunity. More recently, they have raised that estimate to near 90%. (As of now, we are nowhere close to the numbers needed to achieve herd immunity.)
I did say it seems to be the case, and since we’re just a year into this pandemic, there are a dearth of studies but here’s one
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179
Given that early antibody decay after acute viral antigenic exposure is approximately exponential,3 we found antibody loss that was quicker than that reported for SARS-CoV-1,4,5 and our findings were more consistent with those of Long et al.1 Our findings raise concern that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 may not be long lasting in persons with mild illness, who compose the majority of persons with Covid-19. It is difficult to extrapolate beyond our observation period of approximately 90 days because it is likely that the decay will decelerate.3 Still, the results call for caution regarding antibody-based “immunity passports,” herd immunity, and perhaps vaccine durability, especially in light of short-lived immunity against common human coronaviruses. Further studies will be needed to define a quantitative protection threshold and rate of decline of antiviral antibodies beyond 90 days.
It’s only been about three weeks since the CDC begged people not to have Superbowl parties and were largely ignored - remember all the maskless idiots on the news? Maybe the plateau is due to that. If it drops again in a couple/three weeks, that’s where I’d lay blame.