COVID update
By There’s good and bad news on the COVID front.
In regard to the latter, the three-day moving average for COVID deaths in the USA is now up over 1,000 again. Basically, we’re now racking up a 9/11-level death count every couple of days. 97% to 99% of these deaths would not be happening if the people who are dying had chosen to get vaccinated.
Hospitalization levels are creeping toward their January highs, and may surpass them in another three weeks or so. (I still have yet to hear a coherent argument about why voluntary vaccination status shouldn’t be used as a triage criterion when making necessary decisions about access to scarce medical resources).
On the other hand, it looks like the current media coverage regarding all the people who are dying needlessly is having an effect: daily vaccination totals are back up to one million per day for the first time since early June. Other good news includes the likelihood of Pfizer getting an emergency use authorization for its vaccine for five to twelve year old children by late September.
Speaking of which, with 72.5% of adults vaccinated, and the growth in that percentage starting to rise again, daily death totals from COVID in the USA will probably start to drop again in the early fall, which will no doubt lead to all the people who claim this was never a big deal to start proclaiming that loudly again (The USA has now experienced 766,000 excess deaths since February of last year. Excess deaths are deaths above and beyond the number of deaths that would have been expected if age adjusted mortality had remained constant over that time).