Covid: This Time, Endgame in View?


Yes, Florida, [your Gov.] DeSantis is allowing you to choose death so that he can have a greater political life.

— Charles Blow, New York Times

On May 13, 2021, "the CDC’s head Rachel Walensky announced

“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing. If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.

“The President backed up Walensky. The vaccine is widely available to anyone 12 or over who wants it; those unvaccinated remain so mostly by choice.”

Leaders had spoken. That was then, when this blog wondered if Covid was nearly over.

Two months later, the Delta surge swept America.

On July 28, the 7-day average of U.S. Covid cases reached 69,300, up from 12,000 five weeks earlier. The 7-day average — the measurement used for all figures that follow — of cases would peak at 167,445 on September 2. Hospitalizations would lag cases, with 7-day averages rising from a low under 12,000 June 28 up through 43,515 August 3 to a peak of 93,577 on September 3, before falling back to 43,500.

Source 7-day ave: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#hospitalizations

Deaths, even more of a lagging indicator, were at only 248 on July 8, roughly comparable to flu deaths during a normal flu season. By August 25, the Delta virus had pushed the death count to 1,328, and it peaked September 21 at 1,975. Now, the 7-day daily death average is 1,314 and going down.
Source 7-day ave: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

During the Delta surge, media scorched lightly-restricted Florida as deaths hit an average of 381 a day during the week ending September 1. In the most recent week, however, populous Florida averaged just five deaths a day, a figure lower than 33 smaller states. But Timesman Charles Blow (see above) and the rest of media have yet to notice Florida’s good news.

Recently, Jim Geraghty at National Review did ask the question, “Is Covid-19 (Almost) Over?”

Geraghty found that:

There’s plenty of room in the overwhelming majority of hospitals from coast to coast; as of this writing, just 7 percent of the nation’s hospital beds that are being used are being used for COVID-19 patients. For those who end up in the hospital, doctors have a lot more treatment options now than at the start of the pandemic [and] of course, there are monoclonal-antibody therapies.   .   . For two months, tens of thousands of people have attended college- and pro-football games, weekend after weekend, and those games haven’t become super-spreader events.

Yes, little evidence today that “super-spreader” events deserve the name or blame.

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