The Pandemic Is Over !
WHO declared end of the pandemic
Covid-19, however, remains a disease to be reckoned with. A recent outbreak at a conference about Covid (yes, you read it right), 35 attendees were later tested positive (ars technica, PDF). This shows that indoor gatherings still pose a risk for contracting the virus even at times of low community spread. Covid-19 patients don't fall severely ill any more and those who do are largely affected by prior health issues.
Also noteworthy is a weird Coronavirus outbreak in mink (ars technica, PDF) indicating a source for future outbreaks.
This said, the graphs and the table show very nicely that some countries, including the USA and its Washington State, still have a too-high mortality that seems to decrease only cautiously. Other countries, including Germany and Tunisia, have far fewer deaths per capita. France is taking the middle ground here. Death numbers will never reach zero.
In each country, death numbers will reach their own low, which depends on the quality of health care (the USA is lagging here and will have higher numbers), the daily exposure to various infectious agents and the built-up of herd immunity (this would be Tunisia) and the degree of intimacy of person-to-person contact and masking in public (France should therefore have higher numbers than Germany and China should have very low numbers).
The pandemic might be over but my graphs have room until the end of June. I will therefore have a few more updates, maybe not every two weeks. My charts now reflect the irrelevance of daily infection numbers. Likewise, testing data and test-positive rates are no longer given. Some numbers are no longer available, such as French ITU and the R-value in the USA and Tunisia.
The pandemic is over and we can return to our previous behaviour where we infected each other freely with all kinds of viruses and bacteria.
One might wish that we do now wash our hands more often and more thoroughly. We might also be more aware of people coughing loudly in a crowded train. But in my surroundings I see little indication that the pandemic has had a lasting effect on our behaviour and in another year, that too will have passed.
