Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

There is also increased vaccine hesitation in minority communities, particularly African Americans. I think you have to go more granular than red state-blue state to prove the hypothesis here.

 

The protracted time frame and difficulty in getting it will only make this trend worse. People will just give up on it, or forget about it, or just throw up their hands and fall away from it essentially by simple attrition.

 

And, per Zeno, you’re never gonna get there. A man’s gotta know his limits.

 

True in many cases. Worth a look.
I'm trying to make sense of the county-level and metro-area acceptance rates chart, which has FIPS codes but not the corresponding city name.

 

The pandemic is never going to end. The last person to have COVID will just get less sick forever without being completely well. Sucks to be that guy, they'll probably have to keep wearing a mask.

 

I guess it's not fair to me to say things like "math!" and not actually post it.

Here's an example.

The lowest number of hospitalizations the US has seen since the beginning of the pandemic (or at least since April 2020 when we started to actually count them for the whole country) was 28,020 on June 14.

Now, I really like hospital census as a stat. Unlike cases, it's reported regularly every day (cases are often reported by labs that drop them in batches at irregular intervals) and is immune to holiday distortions. There is a small day-of-the-week effect on their fluctuations.

On Nov. 18, hospitalizations were 21.2% higher than they had been a week earlier. This was particularly interesting, because on Nov. 17 that number had been +24.0%. On Nov. 16, it had been +23.5%. Nov. 18 was the first day that number had gone down rather than up in quite some time.

That number has alternated between drops and plateaus ever since, with no clear period of rise. You can see the pattern in the blue line here:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuTr3kLWYAAdDCA?format=jpg&name=medium

In the early weeks of January, I told people we were trending toward a drop in hospitalizations as that number approached zero, even while the headlines were still blaring about an endless winter wave. The rate crossed zero and into the negatives on Jan. 13, which did in fact turn out to be the tipping point. Hospitalizations have dropped ever since, and they've dropped at an increasing rate.

Today, Feb. 16, the US hospital census stands at -18.5% from what it was 7 days ago, the lowest number its been in a long time. (I think since the beginning of the pandemic, but I haven't double-checked all the way back). It's not just that cases are dropping, but the rate at which cases are dropping is speeding it up. If and when that turns around, we would see the rate of change slow down before reversing itself before plateauing and then rising again back toward the positive numbers. The fact that we haven't even seen the beginning of that slowing acceleration yet suggests we have at least a couple of weeks at current decline rates, if not more, before the decline could even slow down. And then it would still be declining for awhile, just at a slower and slower rate.

But at the rate it's declining now (-18.5% per week), then hospitalizations would drop below the old June 14 record in 29 days, or on March 17 (64533 * 0.815^4.14 = 27,668). 15 days after that, at our old friend Opening Day, it would be 64533 * 0.815^6.29 = 17,822, or roughly 1/3rd lower than the lowest number we've seen in the pandemic.

And that's *if* the rate of decline stays the same and doesn't continue to drop like it's been doing, and like you would expect it to do in a country that is vaccinating its highest-risk population as rapidly as it can.

I'm not saying nothing can possibly go wrong here. Things could stop trending positively and start trending negatively as soon as tomorrow's numbers.

What I'm saying is that if something is going to go wrong, it's going to have to happen *soon*. The recovery is a runaway train, and the virus is going to have to show signs that it is engaging the brakes within a week or two if it wants to have a chance to stop and reverse before it runs itself off a cliff.

 

(this is the part where quant points out that I fucked something up that I would have learned in the higher-level math classes if I had ever gotten there)

 

I'm not very worried about the varied various variants that may very variously vary.

 

Don't know where I should put this so here we are

Vegas I could go either way, ymmv

 

This is worrisome.

 

Can you take your mom to that place her friend went?

 

Nah ... looks pretty reasonable to me.