Where We Stand on COVID Today
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Speaking of Dayen, let me also link to his overview of where we stand in terms of COVID that came up today.
The virus appears to be gaining in Midwestern college towns like Grand Forks, North Dakota and Ames, Iowa, where thousands of Iowa State University students and faculty are either sick or in quarantine. Residence halls, classrooms, and parties have become magnets for the virus.
The mitigation measures in these states are light, if they exist. Governors in the Dakotas and Iowa are disinclined to impose much of anything on the population. As the spread is already uncontrolled, you can expect it to thrive in that environment. These are enormous population centers, which helps, but the virus will surely burn through there, as it has elsewhere.
Nationally speaking, yesterday’s count of 30,409 new cases was the lowest since June 22. We still had over 1,000 Americans die, though that was a good trend week-over-week, where the seven-day tracker is now under 1,000, as it has been for the past two weeks.
The good news there is that anti-inflammatory steroids have proven successful in reducing mortality, reducing deaths by about one-third compared to the alternative. Though we had a possibly equivalent amount of virus in the nation in July compared to April, deaths never approached that terrible April level, and stalled out at roughly half that rate. As I had said, better treatments would make a difference several months into the crisis, and our health system has responded.
The problem is that the steroid treatment really only affects mortality in late-stage patients. We have nothing that stops people from getting sick. As people move indoors in cooler weather, the threat of more spread (and economic depression as the innovation of outdoor dining, for example, becomes untenable in much of the country) looms. Flu season’s resumption could compound matters.
We are not close to being done with the virus, even if it isn’t infecting or killing quite as many people as before. Last year, news of something taking away a thousand people every day would rightly be seen as a catastrophe. Now it’s just “2020.” We cannot become deadened to this reality.
This point about becoming deadened to reality is a good one. Humans are a very adaptable species and can get used to about anything. At this point, six months into this, I am not really scared. I just feel like I am in an endless cycle of days that are the same, waiting this out and somehow being slightly cheered that we only have 35-40,000 cases a day instead of the 75,000 we had in June. This is supposed to be a good thing? It should be an outrage. As I am about to start teaching one of my courses in person next week (the other will be online), I suppose I should be more nervous, though I’m not really. I just want to set the course culture for a couple of weeks before this all blows up on us. Of course, I’m in a state with a 1% positive testing rate in recent days, so if anyone can make it happen, it might be us. That however does not mean I am confident. Just kind of blah. On the other hand, I cannot support the planned sickout by University of Iowa faculty any more than I already do. What a disaster of public health in that state and by that administration.
I do think that the flu season issue might not be as big of a problem as feared though, just because if people are staying more isolated they won’t get the flu either. But I suppose a lot of this depends on what happens when the weather turns cool and people go inside. What happens to restaurants and everything else? What choices do people make? I can’t say my position on human behavior makes me feel overly optimistic.
Anyway, I think it’s been awhile since we’ve had a general open thread discussion about the virus.