Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

We dumped a lot of money on being first in line when production got rolling.

I've been telling people to expect that for months now: Fair or unfair, the combination of having the most people infected and using our finances to be first in line for vaccines will bring the US out of the pandemic faster than responsible regions.

It just cost us 500k lives.

 

Kinda tepid week over week drops in US covid stats, but that's comparing a regular day to a holiday. Still dropping steadily.

Big news of the day was Johnson and Johnson finally giving a real update on manufacturing and delivery schedules for the US:

Johnson & Johnson says it can provide 20M vaccine doses by late March

They expect to deliver 20m in March, which starts in less than a week. This is a one-dose vaccine, as well, so that's like 40m of the current doses.

Between that and the planned increases in deliveries of the other two, our March vaccination program should be about 2.5x as large as February was. Unless something goes wrong with those supply chains, we probably stop needing appointments and start having to try to round up the stragglers sometime in April.

I really, really don't want to declare premature victory or not account for a broad set of scenarios. Anything is possible. But I would be surprised at this point in the pandemic isn't functionally over in the US by sometime in April.

 

re: differences in death totals. Some states will only list a death if it was definitely caused by COVID. Other states try to estimate "probable" COVID deaths based on circumstances, and usually list those separately. IIRC, New York City is the big one for that.

Some trackers count the probable deaths, others don't.

 

Had a previously scheduled visit with my doctor in March, on the day shit hit the fan (NCAA canceled tourney, NBA postponed season the night before, NHL and baseball went on hold).

We got to talking and he said we could lock down for a couple months and get it in check, or we could be dumbasses and a half-million people would die.

 

Fauci is taking heat for saying open-ended stuff. Yeah, we could be wearing masks in 2022. Yeah, we might see fans in stadiums in July. People need to look at his words a bit more closely. I think he’s going with the most conservative answers because he saw what happened under Trump and wants to temper the optimism.

 

I hate the long tradition of asking someone if something is possible, they say "sure, it's possible," and then the headline blares "Person said X might happen!"

 

People get angry at Nate Silver for this. They demand precise and accurate predictions, not probabilities.

 

Those 500,000 wound have died anyway, eventually. [/Christian Republicans]

 

I would have guessed that it was because the glasses were a bit of a shield but they say it is because there is less touching and rubbing of the eyes. Also mentions that they have advised people with contacts to use glasses so they don't risk it when changing those odd little things that you people somehow put on your eyeballs. I had never heard that warning, but I assume everyone washes their hands before they do whatever it is you do to get that thing on and especially off of your eyeball.

 

I'm not wildly in love with the case numbers the US has seen yesterday and today. Week over week plateaus and even slight rises. We're still well down over two weeks ago, so it's probably just that last Monday was a holiday, then we had the snowstorms suppressing numbers and then getting the backlog dumped into the stats, but it's worth keeping an eye on.