Numbers Become Unreliable As Do Predictions
Trends within countries remain the sole information of value
In the countries on my list, the daily death number seems to want to settle at around 0.1 per 100 000. This is one daily dead per a million inhabitants. For Germany, that would be about 80 daily deaths, for the US, about 350 etc. Is this going to be the new normal? Too little to be of great concern but high enough to remain something to reckon with?
Incidences are peaking in the USA and Washington State but are climbing in Western Europe.
Hospital patients are not hogging the ITUs any more but there is nevertheless a steady increase in the US, France and Germany (no data in Britain and Tunisia).
Curious to see if predictions for this autumn and winter will hold.
| Daily Incidence | Daily ITU | Daily Deaths | Daily Pos. Rate | Cumulative Excess Death | Death Projection | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USA | 031.2 → | 1.0 ↗︎ | 0.130 → | 21.3% | 15.3% | ↘︎ |
| WA State | 034.5 → | 1.1 ↗︎ | 0.154 ↘︎ | 15.0% ↗︎ | 11.3% | ↘︎ |
| Britain | 034.9 ↗︎ | 0.3 | 0.082 → | 03.3% | 12.4% | ↓ |
| France | 189.7 ↑ | 1.4 ↗︎ | 0.087 ↗︎ | 32.7% ↑ | 11.7% | ↘︎ |
| Germany | 108.7 ↗︎ | 1.2 ↗︎ | 0.098 ↘︎ | 51.3% | 07.2% | ↓ |
| Tunisia | 016.8 ↑ | 0.2 | 0.047 ↑ | 46.3% ↑ | 16.7% | ↗︎ |
Since so many people around me are unmasked, here is a statistic (popup) that shows what would happen if the US population went from the current 10% masking to 80% (data by IHME):
Between now and late September, infection rate would be down 10-20x. Each day 200 000 people would not get sick (a reduction from the current ~200K to ~20K new infections per day).
And 10 000 lives would be spared. For comparison: deadly road accidents cause ~10 000 US deaths in the same 3-month period.
The following might sound harsh but people who don't mask in these days are responsible for making this pandemic worse. This is be very much akin to people going over the speed limit and thus risking deadly accidents (deadly mostly for others, that is, namely the vulnerable pedestrians).
And we know that, once you sit behind a wheel, the car controls how you drive because you almost always go too fast. That is so because humanity is not really capable of self-restraint (some individuals are). This is why we have traffic laws and we punish people who don't follow them.
So why do we still debate whether we should have pandemic rules and punish those who don't follow them?
Because the majority of our society has decided that they want to be free again. And they willingly step over a not-small number of dead bodies. They say that the virus will be here forever and that this will be the new normal, while either downplaying the effect of Post-Covid Symptoms (vulgo: Long Covid) or hoping that the current Omicron variant causes even less of this debilitating side effect than BA.1, the last one we had data on.
I say that it is too early for that much freedom, especially in the light of this autumn and winter, where numbers could increase again.
I can also see a near future where the more vulnerable, who tend to be the older generation (and who have accumulated more wealth than the younger), will feel the need to protect themselves from the younger. And, who knows, maybe some will decide to rather use that money on themselves than passing it on to the next generation.