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Brace yourself for the surge in deaths

NewDealdemocrat | July 23, 2021 2:25 pm

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Coronavirus dashboard for July 21: brace yourself for the surge in deaths

I have been warning since late June that the situation would likely look very different by the end of July. By 2 weeks ago, I wrote:

“In the near future, there appears to be bad news and *relatively* “good” news for the US. The bad news is that the “delta wave” is spreading, and we should expect a real outbreak on the order of last summer’s by early August. The *relatively* “good” news is that the death rate is likely not to be nearly so bad if the experience in the UK is any guide.”

Cases have nearly tripled in the US in the past 2 weeks:

Since deaths lag by about 28 days, we haven’t nearly begun to see the kind of increase that is already baked into the cake. In the UK, the government has been congratulating itself over the low death rate. And in comparison with the number of deaths last winter, they are correct. To some extent, this is due to the fact that 15% more of the UK population has been vaccinated during the Delta wave there:

But over the last 2 weeks, the death rate in the UK has actually increased *faster* than the rate of new cases:

If we compare the increase in deaths in the UK over the past two weeks with the increase in cases 2 to 4 weeks before, it isn’t clear at all that the death rate there isn’t going to follow cases proportionately higher over the next month.
Turning to the US, deaths have only risen slightly so far, but again, since deaths follow cases by about 4 weeks, we are probably only 2 weeks away from a proportionate increase in cases. And in the US, there has been no comparable surge in vaccinations since the onset of the Delta wave. In fact, there has been subsidence.

For a taste of what is in store, here are new cases and deaths in Arkansas, one of the States where the Delta wave increase started the earliest:

Deaths have risen just as fast as cases and started to rise very quickly after cases did.

So, brace yourselves. Cases have nearly tripled in the US over the past 2 weeks. Deaths are likely to increase to nearly 1000/day over the next 2 to 4 weeks.

One more thing: as I wrote a few days ago, the virus is essentially a parasitic copy machine. Its adaptive mechanism is chance mutation. But the human *reaction* to the virus, and to knowledge about the trend in cases and deaths, is fiendishly difficult to model. For example, almost certainly after hearing from their lawyers, Fox News issued a spate of “get the vaccine!” messages from their hosts. Will that continue, or even intensify? Will Congressional GOPers and Red State governors change their tunes? As cases and even more importantly deaths go parabolic, panic is likely to set in. What will the unvaccinated do then? Impossible to know.

13 Comments

Eric377 says:

July 23, 2021 at 10:34 am

I would imagine that cases are significantly undercounted – maybe more undercounted than since mid-2020. The testing is still in place but testing has mostly returned to clinical settings, both a little harder to arrange and certainly fewer daily reminders that you can get tested. If I had symptoms as I had in May 2020 (my first of 3 negative tests), I would probably not consider going through the hoops to get tested. Vaccinated people are discouraged from getting tested in reality. My sister had COVID in Jan 2021 and got vaccinated in May and 3 weeks ago had a bit of “a cold” at the family gathering (at her house). She did not get tested, yet the symptoms were very much as a mild case of COVID – in fact she said they were a bit more than she had in January, which seemed almost entirely asymptomic. She probably did not have it, but the “this might be COVID” reflex has weakened.

I believe the data on testing during this pandemic is going to prove hard to interpret really. I am pretty certain that at least in Green Bay area, by October 2020, a whole lot of people were taking “business” decisions on whether or not to test. Consider that the “good” positivity rates of maybe 3% or 5% implied anwhere from 19 of 20 to 32 of 33 tested people observing a 3 or 4 day quarantine waiting for results that were negative. And maybe everyone in their house was expected to do the same because of school rules. Heck, even bad positivity of 20% still had 4 of 5 tested people going through this. People started to bail on testing and the milder your symptoms, the greater the chance of bailing were. So you had a few groups of people going through mandated periodic testing (in Green Bay, many healthcare people, the NFL Packers + staff and also meat workers over at JBS and a few other places) plus people really concerned they might have it in something other than a mild way. The mildly ambiguous symptoms mostly never got tested and the contact tracing was not strong to find those totally asymptomatic and the mechanism to oblige them to test was nonexistent really. The “denominator” of the rate was anything but representative of the total population.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:

July 24, 2021 at 10:14 am

The ridiculous post-WWII geopolitical stance of the US which lead to its posing as the French surrogate opposing self-rule in Vietnam garnered little public attention until after the 1968 Tet offensive racked up the highest US casualty rate of the war.

“Everything counts in large amounts.” – Martin Gore
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 24, 2021 at 3:59 pm

CHICAGO — They acknowledged that they could have showed up months ago. Many were satisfied that they were finally doing the right thing. A few grumbled that they had little choice.

On a single day this past week, more than half a million people across the United States trickled into high school gymnasiums, pharmacies and buses converted into mobile clinics. Then they pushed up their sleeves and got their coronavirus vaccines.

These are the Americans who are being vaccinated at this moment in the pandemic: the reluctant, the anxious, the procrastinating.

In dozens of interviews on Thursday in eight states, at vaccination clinics, drugstores and pop-up mobile sites, Americans who had finally arrived for their shots offered a snapshot of a nation at a crossroads — confronting a new surge of the virus but only slowly embracing the vaccines that could stop it.

The people being vaccinated now are not members of the eager crowds who rushed to early appointments. But they are not in the group firmly opposed to vaccinations, either.

Instead, they occupy a middle ground: For months, they have been unwilling to receive a coronavirus vaccine, until something or someone — a persistent family member, a work requirement, a growing sense that the shot was safe — convinced them otherwise.

How many people ultimately join this group, and how quickly, could determine the course of the coronavirus in the United States.

Some of the newly vaccinated said they made the decision abruptly, even casually, after months of inaction. One woman in Portland, Ore., was waiting for an incentive before she got her shot, and when she heard that a pop-up clinic at a farmers’ market was distributing $150 gift cards, she decided it was time. A 60-year-old man in Los Angeles spontaneously stopped in for a vaccine because he noticed that for once, there was no line at a clinic. A construction worker said his job schedule had made it difficult to get the shot.

Many people said they had arrived for a vaccine after intense pressure from family or friends.

“‘You’re going to die. Get the Covid vaccine,’” Grace Carper, 15, recently told her mother, Nikki White, of Urbandale, Iowa, as they debated when they would get their shots. Ms. White, 38, woke up on Thursday and said she would do it. “If you want to go get your vaccine, get up,” Ms. White told her daughter, who was eager for the shot, and the pair went together to a Hy-Vee supermarket.

Others were moved by practical considerations: plans to attend a college that is requiring students to be vaccinated, a desire to spend time socializing with high school classmates, or a job where unvaccinated employees were told to wear masks. Their answers suggest that the mandates or greater restrictions on the unvaccinated that are increasingly a matter of debate by employers and government officials could make a significant difference. …

ayed tet accina
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 24, 2021 at 4:04 pm

They Waited, They Worried, They Stalled.

This Week, They Got the Shot.

The U.S. vaccine rollout has plateaued and the course of the coronavirus pandemic

in this country may depend on how many people are ultimately swayed to get vaccinated.
EMichael says:

July 25, 2021 at 11:55 am

But just remember, we must be civil to the anti-vaxxers. Just because they are the reason we are going to start seeing 1000 deaths a day does not matter. “Fortunately” they will make up the vast, vast majority of deaths. But don’t call them assholes.
- Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
  
  July 29, 2021 at 1:18 pm
  
  EMike,
  
  Maybe it would be sufficient to clarify, ” But I was talking about you, not to you.”
  
  :<)
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 25, 2021 at 3:46 pm

After an all too brief respite, the United States is again at a crossroads in the pandemic. The number of infections has ticked up — slowly at first, then swiftly — to 51,000 cases per day, on average, more than four times the rate a month ago. The country may again see overflowing hospitals, exhausted health care workers and thousands of needless deaths.

The more contagious Delta variant may be getting the blame, but fueling its rise is an older, more familiar foe: vaccine hesitancy and refusal, long pervasive in the United States. Were a wider swath of the population vaccinated, there would be no resurgence — of the Delta variant, or Alpha variant, or any other version of the coronavirus.

While mild breakthrough infections may be more common than once thought, the vaccines effectively prevent severe illness and death. Yet nearly half of the population remains unvaccinated and unprotected. About 30 percent of adults have not received even a single dose, and the percentage is much higher in some parts of the country.

America is one of the few countries with enough vaccines at its disposal to protect every resident — and yet it has the highest rates of vaccine hesitance or refusal of any nation except Russia.

Public health experts have fruitlessly warned for months that the virus — any version of it — would resurge if the country did not vaccinate enough of the population quickly enough. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, predicted in January that Florida might have a rough summer. Now one in five new infections nationwide is in Florida.

True, the speed and ferocity with which the Delta variant is tearing through Asia, Europe, Africa and now North America has taken many experts by surprise. It now accounts for about 83 percent of the infections in the United States.

But Delta is by no means the wickedest variant out there. Gamma and Lambda are waiting in the wings, and who knows what frightful versions are already flourishing undetected in the far corners of the world, perhaps even here in America.

Every infected person, anywhere in the world, offers the coronavirus another opportunity to morph into a new variant. The more infections there are globally, the more likely new variants will arise.

The United States will be vulnerable to every one of them until it can immunize millions of people who now refuse to get the vaccine, are still persuadable but hesitant, or have not yet gained access. The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again. …

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/health/coronavirus-vaccine-refusal.html?smid=tw-share

The Delta Variant Is the Symptom of a Bigger Threat: Vaccine Refusal

There are almost as many reasons for vaccine hesitancy and refusal as there are unvaccinated Americans. But this problem, not the variant, lies at the root of rising infection rates.
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 25, 2021 at 3:51 pm

William Hanage: The Danger of the Delta Variant
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 25, 2021 at 4:02 pm

… The WHO categorises the emerging COVID-19 variants as either Variants of Concern (VOC) or Variants of Interest (VOI), these in turn have different definitions. Variants of Concern are COVID-19 variants that both meet the criteria of a Variant of Interest but have the added component of having a potential significant impact on global public health either through an increase or “detrimental change in the transmissibility” of the virus, a “change in the clinical disease presentation” or a “decrease in effectiveness of public health and social measures or available diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics.” Currently, the World Health Organisation has classified the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and now Lambda variants as those of concern, with Beta and Delta being the most dominant in South Africa.

Learning the Greek alphabet one COVID variant at a time
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 26, 2021 at 5:02 am

Across the country, GOP lawmakers are rallying around the cause of individual freedom to counter community-based disease mitigation methods, moves experts say leave the country ill-equipped to counter the resurgent coronavirus and a future, unknown outbreak.

In some states, anger at perceived overreach by health officials has prompted legislative attempts to limit their authority, including new state laws that prevent the closure of businesses or allow lawmakers to rescind mask mandates. Some state courts have reined in the emergency and regulatory powers governors have wielded against the virus. And in its recent rulings and analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to limit disease mitigation in the name of free speech.

“The legal framework has evolved in ways that will complicate and perhaps undermine efforts to deal with next public health crisis or even routine health threats,” said Wendy Parmet, director of the Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Law, who also said she has been a “long critic of emergency laws and their potential for abuse.”

A key issue, Parmet and others say, is that the legislative backlash is based on partisan assumptions about this pandemic, limiting states’ options in the face of a new threat.

“Whatever your feelings are about what health officials did in March of 2020, I can talk to you about a future threat that might be different, that would disproportionately affect a different population, that you would feel differently about,” said Lindsay Wiley, director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University and an expert on emergency reform. “Please don’t constrain authority as a reaction in a way that will tie officials to the mast for a future crisis.”

At least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies, according to the Network for Public Health Law, which partnered with the National Association of County and City Health Officials to document the legislative counterpunches. Lawmakers in at least 46 states have introduced hundreds of bills relating to legislative oversight of gubernatorial or executive actions during coronavirus or other emergencies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The measures, as described by the Network for Public Health Law, include a North Dakota law that prohibits a mask mandate, even during an outbreak of tuberculosis, and a new Montana law that prohibits the use of quarantine to separate people who have probably been infected or exposed but are not yet sick. Many bills are modeled on legislation originally crafted by conservative think tanks and activist groups, according to state lawmakers who introduced them.

Among them is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has touted its model legislation aimed at reining in emergency powers so it is more “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public health or safety purpose.”

In an interview, Jonathon Hauenschild, ALEC’s staff policy expert on the model legislation, said that from early in the pandemic he viewed governors’ use of emergency powers as problematic.

“I started to see . . . that once a branch realizes power they didn’t have before, they don’t give it up unless they are forced to,” Hauenschild said. “Some governors still aren’t giving up their power.”

The group’s legislative members wrote the Emergency Limitation Act in 2020. It was finalized in early January, in time for states’ new legislative sessions.

Hauenschild said he has seen the model act’s influence in new laws in Indiana and Kentucky, where certain emergency orders now expire after 30 days unless the General Assembly approves an extension and there are new protections to purchase firearms. The group’s model legislation, which public health experts believe would leave states relatively defenseless in an emergency, is not motivated by ideology, Hauenschild argues.

“It’s really just trying to inject a little bit of accountability into the system,” he said.

ALEC is not the only conservative group behind the flurry of recent bills.

An aide to Republican Massachusetts state Rep. Nicholas Boldyga said his office worked with Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based libertarian group, on legislation imposing a 30-day sunset on emergency orders. Daniel Dew, legal policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, estimated that the group has had discussions with lawmakers in more than half the states and has been able to trace at least 18 bills to its model legislation or other activities.

Republican Montana state Rep. Matt Regier said he received input from the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the political network funded by the Koch fortune, on his bill, which limits the sort of executive actions that can be taken during an emergency, including by enshrining certain religious exemptions, and ensuring the legislature gets to weigh in after 45 days. The measure gained approval in May over Democratic objections, and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte. …

As coronavirus surges, GOP lawmakers are moving to limit public health powers

Washington Post via Boston Globe
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 26, 2021 at 5:08 am

As coronavirus surges, GOP lawmakers are moving to limit public health powers

Frances Stead Sellers and Isaac Stanley-Becker

The Washington Post via the Boston Globe
- Fred C. Dobbs says:
  
  July 26, 2021 at 5:12 am
  
  Across the country, GOP lawmakers are rallying around the cause of individual freedom to counter community-based disease mitigation methods, moves experts say leave the country ill-equipped to counter the resurgent coronavirus and a future, unknown outbreak.
  
  In some states, anger at perceived overreach by health officials has prompted legislative attempts to limit their authority, including new state laws that prevent the closure of businesses or allow lawmakers to rescind mask mandates. Some state courts have reined in the emergency and regulatory powers governors have wielded against the virus. And in its recent rulings and analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to limit disease mitigation in the name of free speech. …
  
  At least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies, according to the Network for Public Health Law, which partnered with the National Association of County and City Health Officials to document the legislative counterpunches. Lawmakers in at least 46 states have introduced hundreds of bills relating to legislative oversight of gubernatorial or executive actions during coronavirus or other emergencies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. …
Fred C. Dobbs says:

July 29, 2021 at 8:45 am

On top of a historic heat wave, the Pacific Northwest has been hit with a rise in COVID-19 cases caused by the Alpha, Delta, and Gamma variants. And while much of the world is focused on Delta, or B.1.617.2, government officials in Washington state are particularly wary of Gamma (P.1).

Washington state’s leading COVID-19 strain remains Alpha (B.1.1.7), first detected in the U.K. But according to recent data released by the state’s Department of Health (DOH), cases caused by Gamma reached 16.3% in mid-June — a decrease from a high of 20.6% in May. Delta cases increased by more than 10% from May to June, now making up 17.6% of infections in the state — all while Alpha cases continue to slowly dwindle. …

The Gamma Variant’s Rise in Washington State