That would be lovely.
I’ll argue that what really happened is that reporting collapsed for the week+ that Texas was closed due to cold weather.
So the big steep drop is just dirty data and so is the big steep climb afterwards. If you just straight-line from pre cold-snap to now things look fairly ordinary: i.e. a slow decline. That’s probably much closer to the truth.
Paradoxically, I’d expect to see a big(ger) drop in Texas cases and then deaths in the next couple weeks caused by the lack of transmission during the 10 days everybody was actually locked down at home from the weather. Followed a month later by a climb back to normal as they go back to their COVID-ignoring ways.
In the central North America section. How about the European and Asian sections?
Yeah, Texas (and a big chunk of the rest of the South) was under a massive sheet of ice last week, so people couldn’t get tested, and some of the tests people had already taken were stick in transit / processing limbo. Of course case counts are going to go up after it’s over! It would be incredibly surprising if they did not.
I was going to say exactly the same thing. I live in San Antonio and we had no virus data for days. They backfilled the data but both collection and testing was disrupted. That was true in several states. I’ll start worrying if I see a continuous increase next week.
BTW, a better indicator for me is hospitalizations and EMS transports. These are consistently dropping off.
Makes sense. Iowa had some sort of correction that was also warping the stats. It looks like we’re back to a slow decline, which is nice. I hope it keeps up. Most states are still declining.
I agree. There’s something going on that we don’t understand just yet. If I had to wager a guess, it’s probably some sort of network-effect herd immunity thing going on; as in all the people who would be the big spreaders are already immune, so outside of random encounters, most people’s disease vectors aren’t spreading it, even though we’re nowhere near large-scale herd immunity.
I’m thinking the same thing.
Or the worst of the holiday surge is behind us, but we’re still dealing with a fairly high level of community spread diseases. We’ve had a steep decline in the number of new infections but we’re now leveling off at the same point where we were at in October. If new variants take off before we get properly vaccinated, we will likely experience yet another major surge. Fortunately, the J&J vaccine may change the game – I hope.
True. I also read an article that posited that it appeared that on the whole, people really did pay heed to the warnings and admonitions to change our behavior at Thanksgiving/Xmas and that it sort of blunted the peak, and is causing the quick fall-off now. The article went on to warn against drawing any other conclusions and doing things like letting off the restrictions too soon, as that would be doing exactly the opposite of what is needed.
Along the same lines of my first post, I read an article that opined that the best immunization strategy would be to identify (via phone info, advanced math/statistics, etc…) the people most likely to actually spread the virus, and immunize them first, and then worry about everyone else afterward, as that would dramatically reduce spread with the least number of vaccines. I was just extrapolating that on a wider scale and wondering if that happened naturally to some degree and that’s what’s accounting for it.
However, I do have to wonder why it would be a worldwide drop in cases; that seems less like a behavioral thing and more like some sort of biological thing or network effect thing.
I’m trying to imagine what this is like (both the process and the end result of the people “most likely to spread the virus”) and failing due to lack of imagination. Do you have a link or description? I’m curious whether “doesn’t believe in COVID” is a factor in likelihood of spread, thus making the effort to trace them somewhat meaningless.
Here’s the article I read (took me a while to find it):
The Vulnerable Can Wait. Vaccinate the Covid Super-Spreaders First | WIRED
Basically the idea is that very social people cross a lot of social group boundaries and are likely to spread it around more effectively than people who are less social.
My thinking was that maybe the article’s 20% has already substantially been infected and is immune, which would significantly curtail the spread, if the article is indeed right.
Thanks! I’m going to read it when I have a moment, but my initial reaction from your bare bones description is that people who are “very social” and “cross a lot of social group boundaries” these days are apathetic to COVID at best and denialists at worst, so I’m not sure how much sense it makes to track them, since you’re never going to be able to vaccinate them willingly.
It is entirely possible that we are vaccinating the super spreaders right now (the old and the fat).
My post in the breaking news thread.
I dunno, the person i know who is bouncing around socializing, going to parties and restaurants, is obviously not worried about covid, but i don’t think she’d refuse a vaccine if offered. In fact, if people hassled her less about her social life as a result, u think she’d be all over it.
I paraphrased it; the article just goes into some network theory about how some people are basically “hubs” in the sense of they’re more connected to others, because they’re friendly, active, outgoing, etc… without actually attributing any political motives, etc… to them.
I wasn’t saying we should vaccinate them, I was saying that perhaps that cohort of people has already either been vaccinated or infected and is now immune, which might explain why the case counts could be dropping. If you read the article, it makes sense- when that cohort is immune, the spread should drop precipitously, regardless of just how they became immune.