Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I, my wife and my mom have appointments Thursday morning. Town is about 1:30 away. We’re definitely no where near some junk hole in Nevada.

 

We just got the Moderna shot in a vaccine clinic being held in our church. They're shuttling people in and out as quickly as the fifteen minute cautionary wait after the injection allows. Anyone getting the shot - it's a good idea to take a picture of your vaccine card with your phone. That gives you the second shot date for reference and also allows you to prove you've had it if for some reason it comes up.

I haven't been out and running around on Sunday morning for quite a while. It was interesting passing churches with empty parking lots, those with only a few cars, and the ones that were bulging with cars. Shrug. People do what they do, and reason and logic don't enter into it.

 

About 1.8 million shots delivered today, 300k more than last Sunday. Almost 5.8 million from Friday-Sunday.

 

Alright, quick pop back because I can't stop thinking about this stuff.

I'm really starting to think this might be it. No promises, to be sure, but things are just racing in a positive direction far faster than I imagined when I made my "worse holidays than people expect, then faster recovery than people expect" posts back in November.



The nosedive on those charts is insane, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down. The rate of hospitalization drops is actually increasing a little bit this week, which I think is the first sign that our vaccination campaigns on high-risk individuals is working.

Hospitalizations dropped about 18% in the last 7 days, and the rate of the drop seems to be increasing slightly. If we could even maintain this pace for 6.5 more weeks, we would hit Opening Day with 18k people in hospitals. We haven't been below 28k since we had enough tests to have an idea of how many people we had hospitalized with this mysterious new virus last spring.

Re: Vaccinations

Vaccinations are going better than people think. Everyone always thinks that today's headlines (LOTS OF PEOPLE WANT VACCINE, SMALL SUPPLY) will always be true, but in this pandemic things change fast.

Right now, we're vaccinating enough people with mRNA vaccines to account for 1.8% of the population (3.6 doses per 100, but it takes two doses per person) every week. Those vaccines are still promising to slowly build up production levels each week. But even if they just stay at that pace, that gives us 63m people's worth of vaccinations (126m doses) by the end of April. We've already administered 52m doses (26m people's worth) so that's 89m people with mRNA vaccinations by the end of April.

But wait, there's still the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which appears to be less than two weeks away from approval. There haven't been any good updates on their production numbers lately, but in mid-January they were saying they still expect to hit their goal of giving the US 60m doses by the end of April. That's a one-dose vaccine, too. So that would give us ~149m people's worth of vaccinations by the end of April (and there's a chance Novavax could peak in there by the end of April too, but we'll ignore them for now.) That represents 60% of the ~250m eligible adults in the United States. Assume some percentage of people who are eligible and don't want it, then I would guess than means maybe 80% of people who want it will have it by the end of April. We'll clean up the stragglers in May. By June, we'll be trying to figure out who we want to give all these extra vaccines to.

Re: Variants

It sure looks to me like the United States dodged a bullet on variants. They're a global concern, but I don't think they're a significant threat to the United States. The South African, Brazilian and other variants just plain got here too late relative to our mass vaccination program. Oxford vaccine does not appear to be currently in our plans, and all the other vaccines seem to work well against the South African variant. That means they should work well against the Brazilian variant, which is very similar to the SA one in terms of concerning mutations.

The one exception is the UK variant, B117. That one appears like it will have some effect on the United States. It appears to be 50% more transmissible than the common variants already in the US. It is in the US in prevalence that isn't huge yet but it is notable (something like 5-10%) and it does appear to be growing even while our overall virus totals are shrinking.

That's not great, but it isn't the end of the world. We're still pumping out those effective vaccinations. It's a race between our vaccination program pushing transmission down and the variant pushing it up, and when I run the numbers, it sure looks like our vaccination program wins out. Gottlieb has been saying something similar in the press the last few weeks, so I can't be too far out in left field. By my math, it will take 2-5 weeks before the B117 variant could push our transmission rates potentially above 1, and 6-10 weeks for the vaccination program to push it back down below 1. There's just not a large window in between where the B117 could do a lot of damage, especially when you consider it will be spreading among the younger, unvaccinated population that is less likely to experience severe complications.

After that, there's not much left to worry about. Maybe I'm underestimating the effect of reopening and people loosening behaviors, but that only sets us back temporarily before vaccines catch up. Maybe there really is a seasonal component and this stuff just keeps plummeting even faster than I expect. And I guess maybe a mutant strain develops that is so different it's basically an entirely new virus and we have to start from scratch, but that's about as likely as any new virus popping up, and hopefully this time we're more prepared.

End of the day: Vaccines work and we're pumping that shit into arms at a high rate. Congratulations, we win (soon).

 

That's @RickStain's music!

 

Howdy, @RickStain! Good to see you! Thanks for popping in with the good news.

 

Waiting for TigerVols to pop up with doomsday prophecies in 3, 2, 1 ...

Wish I were clever enough to come up with a #coup-related hashtag re: COVID.

 

@RickStain needs a Substack.

 

I’m in awe of the timing and choreography.

 

I guess 497,000 deaths and Jan. 6 insurgency proved me completely wrong all along.

Welcome back @RickStain!