Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

In July we thought we were only picking up 1 case for every 10 true infected. Let's say we have that down to 4:1 now through improved testing, even thought I doubt we've actually gotten in that low. Lots of states still aren't doing anywhere near the testing they need. We're averaging 107k cases per day over the last 7 days.

That would mean we're getting 0.13% of the US population infected every single day. Just a little shy of 1% per week. And growing. We're going to burn this thing out before a vaccine gets here just by having literally everyone infected.

I'm not even joking. For the US at least, I don't think a vaccine even matters at this point. We're going to reach maximum infection and endemic equilibrium before one could be mass-administered.

 

Most important question. Yeah, a handful of little bass.

 

Biden charts ambitious new plan to turn around pandemic

 

That’s pretty close to what I’ve been saying. Now that we’re up to 100K new cases per day, that’s probably more like a million per day, which means 90 million who have had it. So at the current rate of daily cases, we’ll be done with COVID in 8 months. But the losses of lives will be devastating.

 

Good for him.

TO DO: Schedule haircut for Jan. 19

 

Douchebag.

 

At this point, the herd immunity motherfuckers have *won*, whether they were right or not. That's what's going to happen. We can argue until we're blue in the face that we should lockdown everything and get it down to levels where test-and-trace quarantines could eradicate it, it's not going to happen. All we can do is slow the spread enough to try to protect hospital capacity and isolate the most vulnerable if we can.

 

Take care. This stuff is nasty.

 

If you take some basic assumptions that I think are on the conservative side (~22% of the US already infected, catching 20% of infections with current testing levels, an RT of 1.15 nationwide, serial interval of 5 days) we are on pace to reach 50% of the country infected by New Year's Day.

Of course, we could slow down the transmission rate, but that involves behavior change or population immunity. I don't think we're gonna see much behavior change, if anything it's gonna get worse. Even liberals have mostly reached the "we're gonna do everything we always did but with a mask" stage. So all that's left is finding out just how much population immunity slows it down.

 

I wish I could argue, but it's hard to argue with math. Scares hell out of me, because my wife has zero immunity to stuff that attacks her mucous membranes. Her IgA is near non-existent.

One of our best friends spiked a bad fever yesterday and and is having belly issues. Hoping it's just a stomach bug.

 

Legitimately, the only way the economy fully recovers is if the pandemic is under control. Why would anyone argue with the science on this? What we are doing right now is not working.

 

Notre Dame getting serious about covid.