Covid will be the new normal for years to come
I just returned from a holiday in Catalonia (see remarks) and I therefore include Spain in the graphs and I will keep it for a few weeks. A month ago the incidence started shooting up, possibly caused by the brief period of opening of night clubs and similar events. Two weeks ago, ICU occupancy followed but deaths remain low, owed to over half of the population being fully vaccinated, almost as much as in Britain.
In the other places of interest, numbers are going up as well, except for Tunisia. Here, the strict lockdown measures brought incidence and the high number of daily deaths down in spite of only 7% of full vaccination. However, at the current rate of ~27 000 doses a day, vaccination will reach 50% of the population only a year from now. If they were able to ramp it up to 100 000 doses a day, as the acting health minister is suggesting, the goal could be reached before the end of the year.
French incidence is shooting up. Maybe it is coincidence that on both of my plane trips, there was a bunch of French young men whose masks did certainly not sit right. President Marcon's plan of letting only vaccinated people into venues or restaurants will backfire because the French will find a way to fake their certificates and if these "vaccinated" people will not be required to wear masks indoors (as it is planned), the whole measure will backfire. Maybe Marcon should find himself a different people.
Germany is being resilient. It has always been a slow mover, which proved painful in other areas but is a life saver in this stage of the pandemic. When their neighbours started to relax the measures, Germany did what they do best: they debated. And in the end, night clubs and big venues were not opened. And as a consequence, numbers remain among the lowest in the EU. The biggest worry is the fast declining vaccination rate and the returning holidaymakers.
In the USA, all parameters are pointing up. Caused by the high number of counties where the percentage of population vaccination is only half that of the best faring counties, daily death numbers are expected to inch higher than those in the EU.
States leaning to the Democratic side, such as Washington, are faring a lot better than the average. But here too, the high number of unvaccinated, particularly in the more Republican-leaning counties, have pushed incidence up and diverted the ICU curve from its nice downward slope.
| Daily Incidence | Daily Deaths | Daily ICU | Daily Pos. Rate | Average Excess Death | Death Projection | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USA | 15.0 ↗︎ | 0.083 ↗︎ | 1.6 ↗︎ | 07.6 % ↑ | 15.3 % | ↗︎→ |
| WA State | 11.7 ↗︎ | 0.054 → | 0.4 → | 08.8 % ↑ | 08.6 % | ↗︎ |
| Britain | 65.2 ↗︎ | 0.088 ↗︎ | 0.9 ↗︎ | 04.4 % ↑ | 14.8 % | ↗︎↘︎ |
| France | 23.2 ↑ | 0.029 ↘︎ | 1.5 ↘︎ | 01.6 % ↗︎ | 14.8 % | ↗︎ |
| Germany | 01.8 ↗︎ | 0.025 → | 0.4 ↘︎ | 01.4 % ↗︎ | 06.8 % | ↗︎ |
| Tunisia | 38.3 ↘︎ | 1.255 ↗︎ | 30.7 % ↑ | 17.9 % | →↘︎ | |
| Spain | 59.3 ↑ | 0.033 → | 1.5 ↗︎ | 15.6 % ↑ | 14.0 % | ↗︎↘︎ |
Being recently fully vaccinated, I went on a short holiday in Catalonia. Travelling with Corona is certainly burdensome but it is manageable.
The locals on the bus and in the cities/towns I passed were all wearing masks when outside with somebody. This, too, was my first impression of the tourist town where I stayed. I learned though that some people, in most likelihood vacationers like me, simply forgot to put up the mask when in crowded outside places (which was true almost everywhere in the narrow alleys of this old town). I also noticed that many of the eating places had their tables placed in a way that there was way less than 1.5 m between two persons sitting at neighbouring tables. While I and my friends avoided these situations, most tourists apparently had no problem with this cozy arrangement. On the beach, towels were spaced by 2 metres, and there was a guard. But in the water, in a zone next to the shore, where most people gathered, distances were not always kept. At times, even I felt so good to be in a nice holiday place that I forgot to mask up myself.
It is a known fact that vacationing, religious festivities or any leisure event involving crowds and alcohol will spread the virus. But that is not the point here.
It dawned on me that we cannot keep the isolationist behaviour up forever, be it on a personal or on a country level. Likewise, New Zealand will not be able to keep themselves locked away from the world for much longer. The best they can do is get their entire population vaccinated to herd immunity level and then open the country.
Me and you and all of us must accept that the virus and new variants will be with us for years to come and that we will need repeated vaccine jabs and wear masks in the foreseeable future. Events involving large crowds will remain tightly controlled or banned altogether. This new normal will be more cumbersome and more socially cold, but we will adapt. A small percentage of us will get sick in this future, some few will die or have long term health effects. But we will manage because life must go on.
