Probably the least creative thing I do here is my monthly COVID report. I gather the data, group it, and spit it out in a way that I hope gives some insight. I just did this two weeks ago before the Thanksgiving break, but we’re in a period of this crisis in which I think weekly updates are appropriate. This week won’t be a region-by-region assessment but rather an less comprehensive overview of exactly what is happening and where.
California is probably going to be quiet for a while because while we've started to see slightly colder temperatures, we haven't had much real weather -- daytimes are still in the 60-70s. There have been a series of ridges driving most of the rain into Canada, and this pattern is expected to be maintained into late December. In the northern and Sierra foothill counties, there has been cold weather (with snow in the mountains), and a corresponding increase in cases. Death rates, however, continue to look like the March-early June period. And it's still ~74% 65+ for deaths. <18 is a grand total of 2 (out of 136,904 positives in that age group).
This is encouraging to read, I am very curious to know if this is the last surge that we're going to see before this is all over or if we'll get hit with one more on the west coast/north east before enough of the population is vaccinated. If we think that we're at around 25% immunity already due to the caseload that we've seen and we're gonna vaccinate around 50M people by the end of february in the US, combined with additional infections of around 500K per day (tested positives x 3), that brings us to 80M + 50M + 45M = 175M, or 50% of the US population. I might make this my prediction, if we can maintain where we are at now without losing control, we might be out of the woods (literally) by April.
California is probably going to be quiet for a while because while we've started to see slightly colder temperatures, we haven't had much real weather -- daytimes are still in the 60-70s. There have been a series of ridges driving most of the rain into Canada, and this pattern is expected to be maintained into late December. In the northern and Sierra foothill counties, there has been cold weather (with snow in the mountains), and a corresponding increase in cases. Death rates, however, continue to look like the March-early June period. And it's still ~74% 65+ for deaths. <18 is a grand total of 2 (out of 136,904 positives in that age group).
This is encouraging to read, I am very curious to know if this is the last surge that we're going to see before this is all over or if we'll get hit with one more on the west coast/north east before enough of the population is vaccinated. If we think that we're at around 25% immunity already due to the caseload that we've seen and we're gonna vaccinate around 50M people by the end of february in the US, combined with additional infections of around 500K per day (tested positives x 3), that brings us to 80M + 50M + 45M = 175M, or 50% of the US population. I might make this my prediction, if we can maintain where we are at now without losing control, we might be out of the woods (literally) by April.