Last winter, in spite of mask mandates, in spite of limits to how many people were supposed to gather for the holidays, just under 100,000 Americans died in January (99,998 subtracting Snowboarder_Bo’s January 1 cumulative deaths from February 1 cumulative deaths) and another 42,961 Americans died over the next two weeks. Averaging those 45 days we get 3177 deaths a day.
So…how many people do you think will end up dying a day over the course of those same 46 days in 2022?
On one hand compared to a year ago we have far fewer mask mandates and unrestricted travel and unlimited size of gatherings, possibly significantly waning immunity of those who were vaccinated first (i.e. the elderly and immune compromised) and freaking delta. Plus, in colder states like where I am, cases have risen sharply the past 2 weeks.
On the other we have a lot of vaccination of those ages 12 and up, and just within the past 2 weeks kids ages 5-11 have become eligible for vaccination (though only a million or so kids 11 or younger have been vaccinated yet) and booster shots (which 1 in 3 people over 65 have gotten).
Which of these sets of variables do you weigh more heavily as we stare down the barrel of another holiday season?
What do you anticipate the average daily covid death toll in the US to be from January 1 to February 15?
We’re roughly at the US numbers we had 1 year ago, and rising as they did last year. I think they will peak lower for the reasons you gave, but will rise sharply as people gather for holidays and spend more time indoors in general.
Lots of vaccinations, but evidently the efficacy declines pretty quickly which would negate it from the calculus. Antivaxers are still around, assured by their survival that they are truly immune or that it’s all an overblown hoax. I’m seeing a lot less caution as well, and the variants we have are a bit more vicious. Gonna go with 2,000.
The ranges in the poll don’t quite overlap, so I’m assuming they’re “Up to x thousand”, so I chose 2000/day. I’m actually expecting about 1500/day, though.
About half the US population is properly vaccinated, and taking reasonable precautions, so the death rate will likely be about half what it was same time last year before vaccination became easily available.
But yeah, the new Omicron variant might blow it all out of the water.
The obvious caveat of ‘it depends’ is factored into my own vote. Basically, it will depend on how bad this new variant really is…and whether or not the current vaccination regimes will continue to be effective and/or how quickly they can roll out targeted new vaccinations if it’s really nasty and the current ones aren’t effective.
I have a bad feeling it’s going to go up quite a bit, though so far it doesn’t seem the new variant is as deadly as Delta was. I’m looking at a new daily chart here though that shows on Dec. 16th the US was at 123k per day. On the 27th, it was 237k. The EU is actually worse, but the deaths in both cases seem to be steady at around that 1500 a day (it obviously varies quite a bit day today, but that’s where the mean seems to be falling on the chart I’m looking at). Even globally, it seems to be fairly steady around 7k per day (I wish I knew how to insert graphs from the sites I’m looking at).
We’ll see if the numbers go up substantially in the next week or so…there is a lag between new infections and deaths, of course, so it’s possible they will go up quite a bit in about 2 weeks based on how rapidly things went up in less than a month.
14 day average deaths on Jan 1 2022 is 1422 dead/day. I expect this will go up quite a bit as we’re now getting 500k/day Covid cases thanks to Omicron, which is double the number of daily cases one year ago.
Everybody keeps saying that, but we’re still getting 1200+ deaths a day in the US, and we haven’t even started to see the effect of the case spike of the last 2 weeks. When I look at the data, I’m really not seeing any improvement in the case/death ratio.
Yesterday was 1M new cases in the US. at about 1300 dead per day (the current rate), we’ll have 174K new dead in just four and a half months, bringing the grand total US dead to 1M. Between the patient load and the infection rate among health care workers, the health care system is already in bad shape; it looks to me like the daily death tally will start going up soon (daily case count is understood to be a leading indicator) already and the health care system will probably be overwhelmed, and people will start dying simply because they can’t get treated.
7 day moving average death rate in the US is now 1586/day.
This does not count the excess deaths due to overwhelmed hospitals.
I predict that when 2022 is over, the life expectancy charts for the US will show another decline.
In 2020, life expectancy in the US dropped 1.8 years, the first drop like this since WW II. Not all countries fared this badly, but Russia and Belarus did worse. Great company to be in.