Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

the first shot provokes some amount of immune response and will confer some amount of protection. The exact amount hasn’t been quantified because they determined the double-shot was noticeably better and proving safety and efficacy for that was a higher priority

 

I believe next in line after the older demographic (wonder if I could push myself into that one?) are essential workers, which I would fall into.

 

(referring to the US here for all "we"s)

I thought we'd hit a 200k case day this week but we just missed it. If you can squint, you can see the growth in the 7-day average start to bend, which means that the rate of growth is slowing a little at least.



Here's why I've got my weird dark optimism that we will be well on our way to normalcy by very early spring:

7-day average is 165k. If we assume we are detecting 25% of infections (I think it's closer to 15-20%, but I'm willing to be conservative here) that means that 1.4% of the US population is being infected per week. And that rate is growing. And we haven't even hit Thanksgiving and Christmas yet. So in the 10 weeks between now and the end of January when the first wave of the vaccine is getting second doses, we could easily see another 15-20% of the population infected. That's probably roughly equivalent to how many were infected in total in the first 8 months of the pandemic.

At our current estimates of transmission rates of about 1.2 nationally, removing that much of the population from the susceptible pool should be enough to drop transmission rates below 1 in almost every state at current behavior patterns even before you factor in a vaccine. At that point, the ball starts to roll downhill, so to speak. Every week that passes after that, more people will be vaccinated and there will be fewer cases left to infect new people. Weather effects will also stop working against us. The exponential growth (well, on this side, it's exponential decay when it's working in this direction) should mean that every week in February and March, not only will we gain more, but the amount we gain should be accelerating.

The fine print, of course, is that it will be bought and paid for with the deaths of many thousands of people over the winter. Possibly hundreds of thousands.

 

Interesting that our positivity rate in Virginia has dipped from 7.6 percent to 6.8 percent in the last week. That's nice to see.

 

Something something science entertainment workers are "essential."

Entertainment Industry Workers Exempt From Newsom’s Stay-At-Home Order – Deadline

 

That scary realization that you've been tested for COVID-19 more frequently than your state's governor.

 

There are a lot of folks who were exempted because their jobs were important to the economy in some way or another.

 

My wife occasionally sees Daniel on this thing and thinks it's me, as we love all the same shit.

Maybe this will end like Spinal Tap did instead of the way Animal House did.