On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356^th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here.

I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later:

Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as possible. Clearly, there will be at least in the hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, not tens of thousands – but will there be millions? 

Note that I was wondering how many deaths due to the new coronavirus would occur worldwide, and I thought it likely would be below a million. As of a few days ago, the number stood at 6.9 million. To be honest, I had thought (before I saw the figure 20 minutes ago) that it would be much more than that, maybe 20 million.[i]

Our goal at this point should be to keep total deaths from the pandemic – in the US – below 100,000, and of course, as far below that figure as possible.

The current deaths figure for the US is about 1.13 million. Note this is more than 1/7 of the global total. Of large countries, the US figure is second only to Brazil’s on a per capita basis. And being behind Brazil isn’t any indication of virtue, given that their president at the time, Bolsonaro, was literally encouraging people to get infected, in a misguided attempt to achieve herd immunity. 

There were people talking about adopting exactly that policy in the US, including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior advisor at the White House. Of course, as long as you weren’t bothered by the prospect of about 200 million deaths in the US, that would have been a good policy to follow. You can be sure that the people who were advocating that policy were taking all the steps they could take to make sure they wouldn’t be in that 200 million figure! 

This is why our mortality rate is almost unique among “developed” countries in having gone up during the last two years, not down.

In the post, I focused on how awesome exponential growth was, since total deaths had grown from 1 to 100 in two weeks. I estimated that, if nothing was done to trim this growth (i.e. lockdowns), there would be 60,000 deaths in three weeks. Fortunately, there were lockdowns in at least some states, and there were “only” 15,000 deaths in three weeks. But we still ended up at well over 1 million deaths.

What I didn’t mention in that post was that, if I extrapolated the current rate of growth in deaths into the future, there would be good news and bad news. The good news was that the pandemic would be over in the US by about mid-May (of 2020, of course) – that is, less than two months after I wrote the post. However, the bad news was that the entire US population would be dead by that day. That’s a hell of a way to end a pandemic.

However, I looked on the bright side:

I’m actually optimistic that total lockdown will happen next week – and if it doesn’t happen next week, it absolutely will happen the following week. Why do I say this? Because of exponential growth. Reported (not actual) cases will be over 40,000 by next Wednesday (and almost certainly higher), meaning that total deaths due to just those infections will ultimately be around 1300 (using the same 3% figure for mortality, which is in the high middle of the range estimated in the article that spurred Saturday’s post, which BTW has had 40 million views in the past week).

I expect that these numbers will finally spur the White House to order a nationwide lockdown (including lockdown of all travel except for emergency needs) next week.

It seems my optimism was badly misplaced. More on why it was misplaced in a subsequent post.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, May14.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,162,701

Average daily deaths last seven days: 39

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 370

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.0%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 106,792,474

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 24,178 (3,454/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 137,969 (19,710/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.0% (0.1% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

In last week’s post, I was happy to announce that it seemed the pandemic was really over, since for the first time, the numbers showed a 0.0% increase in both Covid cases and Covid deaths (the numbers were actually positive in both cases, but less than .05, so they were rounded down). This was the first time that either increase had been 0.0%, and I considered the fact that both were at that level to be some sort of sign from heaven that the pandemic was truly over (I might have been influenced by the fact that the White House is ending the pandemic emergency, of course).

Unfortunately, I must have misinterpreted my heavenly signs. The 0.0% increases must actually have been part of an elaborate heavenly plot to teach us all that it’s too soon to think we can let down our guard: Cases increased by .1% this week and deaths increased by .2% (they were 370 last week vs. 76 the previous week). To give you some perspective, the last time we had more deaths than last week was the week of March 5.

Even less comforting, from my point of view, is the fact that the 370 number from last week is in the middle of the range that we’ve been in for the last 12 months: about 550 on the high side to 150 on the low side (I’m now excluding the 76 number from last week as an outlier). In other words, as far as Covid deaths go, we’ve made literally zero progress in 12 months.

Of course, the pandemic emergency is still going to be called off, since there are a lot of people who think we should never have declared an emergency in the first place. They believe that the danger has been greatly exaggerated all along. And this is true, as long as you ignore the fact that, if Covid deaths had continued increasing at the rate they were increasing at the end of March 2020 – i.e., almost doubling every day – the entire US population would have been dead by early May 2020. Of course, there’s no disputing that the emergency would have been over then…

But I’m now quite glad I got my second bivalent booster shot on Friday (a privilege of being over 65, along with access to Medicare, which is by far the best health insurance available to anyone except maybe the super-rich). I recommend you get yours, too, if you’re eligible.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, May 7.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,162,431

Average daily deaths last seven days: 370

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 76

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.2%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 106,768,296

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 137,969 (19,710/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 52,271 (7,467/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.1% (0.0% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

A month or two after I started writing this blog (which was in the middle of March 2020), a friend who lives in a state that had so far had about zero cases (at the same time as the refrigerator trucks were hard at work in NYC) asked me what growth rate in deaths I would be satisfied with. At the time, deaths were probably growing around 15-25 percent per day, meaning that, if they continued at that rate, the entire US population would probably have been dead by the end of the year (a bummer, to be sure!).

However, by that time there were already a sizable number of people, led by our esteemed president, who thought things were going to work out just fine, as long as we put people back to work as quickly as possible (remember the meat packers? And the managers who had a betting pool on who would be the next employee to die of Covid? Ah, those were the days…). So, people were already telling me my death numbers were imaginary, etc.

I could only think of one answer for my friend: 0%. Here’s the problem: with a virus that grows exponentially, it doesn’t matter how low it starts (and on March 1, 2020, the date on which I retroactively started tracking and deaths, there had been only one Covid death so far in the US), it will eventually expand to include the entire population - unless something intervenes like herd immunity (remember that? Since waiting for that to happen would have probably led to over 200 million deaths, I’m glad we didn’t listen to the people, including some in the White House, not surprisingly, who advocated for that) or – God forbid! – public health measures.

Well, this past week we actually hit 0.0% new deaths in the past week on my spreadsheet (there were actually 76, but that’s less than .1%, which is how I’ve been rounding deaths percentages since the beginning). On the other hand, deaths are still up .4% over last month, meaning 4,581 people died of Covid in April.

But 4600 isn’t an insignificant number, and more importantly, the Arcturus variant from India is now gaining a foothold in the US, which could drive up both cases and deaths in the next few weeks. I’m not going to stop paying attention now!

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, April 30.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 1,159,839

Average daily deaths last seven days: 76

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 173

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.0%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 106,630.327

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 52,271 (7,467/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 112,135 (16,019/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.0% (0.1% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

A couple of days ago, WaPo published this story that started with, “Federal health officials say that covid-19 remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States, tied to about 250 deaths daily, on average, mostly among the old and immunocompromised.”

Of course, there’s the usual crowd of commenters who are sure that nobody with an MD after their name (unless they’re also a Fox News commentator) can be trusted to make true statements about Covid; the article deals with what those people will inevitably say (but only if the story ever gets reported on Fox, of course – not a good assumption).

I admit that even I stopped wearing a mask in indoor crowds, but I may rethink that, especially if the number of deaths starts climbing again. However, what I’m really afraid of is a long, lingering Covid case. I’ve always been quite healthy (the last time I was hospitalized overnight was when I was 17 – of course, that was only 30 years ago! 😊), and the idea of not feeling well for a long time is quite disturbing to me.

I’ll definitely get the second dose of the omnivalent booster that was given last year. That’s quite important since it specifically targets Omicron’s sub-variants; as far as I know, those are the entire Covid landscape now. In fact, there’s a new Arcturus sub-variant that’s spreading rapidly in India, where the delta variant originated, to devastating effect (remember the hundreds of bodies floating down the Ganges, because the families couldn’t afford the wood needed to cremate their loved ones?). It will “inevitably” end up as the leading subvariant here, too, although that’s not in itself a reason to panic now, according to the experts.

I was thinking it might be time to close this blog down. Nope.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, April 16.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,158,160

Average daily deaths last seven days: 173

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 232

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.1%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 106,465,921

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 94,697 (13,528/day

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 121,476 (17,354/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.1% (0.1% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

Paul Krugman, columnist in the New York Times, is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and writes great articles on economics. But he understands that a lot of what happens in the economic realm is really just a reflection of what’s happening in the political realm. His most recent column starts with these three paragraphs:

Last Friday the Medicare trustees released their latest report on the system’s finances, and it contained some unexpected good news: Expenditures are running below projections, and the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund won’t be exhausted as soon as previously predicted.

But one important reason for this financial improvement was grisly: Covid killed a substantial number of Medicare beneficiaries. And the victims were disproportionately seniors already suffering from severe — and expensive — health problems. “As a result, the surviving population had spending that was lower than average.”

Now, Covid killed a lot of people around the world, so wasn’t this just an act of God? Not exactly. You see, America experienced a bigger decline in life expectancy when Covid struck than any other wealthy country. Furthermore, while life expectancy recovered in many countries in 2021, here it continued to fall.

Of course, Krugman is certainly not celebrating the fact that Medicare is more fiscally sound than previously thought (I always love alarmist projections – which he’s not providing here of course – about Medicare or Social Security “running out of money”. There are all sorts of ways to fund both of them, as long as you don’t mind raising taxes or cutting benefits for wealthier Americans. For some reason, there always seems to be plenty of money to fund further tax cuts, but there’s great wailing and gnashing of teeth when it comes to figuring out how to keep current benefit levels in lifesaving government programs. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to solve both problems).

Krugman compares the US with Italy, which “…has experienced a generation of economic stagnation, with basically no growth in real G.D.P. per capita since 2000, compared with a 29 percent rise here. Yet Italians can expect to live about five years longer than Americans, a gap that has widened even as the Italian economy flounders.” Hmm…would you live in a “floundering” economy if it would add five years to your life? We should all have such “floundering”!

Krugman points out that the source of this gap is probably political. Why does he say this? Because of the big geographical disparities in life expectancy: “Geographic health disparities have surged in recent decades. According to the U.S. mortality database, as recently as 1990, Ohio had slightly higher life expectancy than New York. Since then, New York’s life expectancy has risen rapidly, nearly converging with that of other rich countries, while Ohio’s has hardly risen at all and is now four years less than New York’s.”

Why this geographic disparity? Krugman sees two primary reasons.

(The first is) the fact that some of the poorest states in America, with the lowest life expectancy, are still refusing to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would cover the bulk of the cost (and the failure to expand Medicaid is killing many hospitals). This suggests that they’re failing to improve health because they don’t want to, not because they can’t afford to.

(The second is) since Covid struck, residents of Republican-leaning counties have been far less likely to get vaccinated and far more likely to die of it than residents of Democratic-leaning counties — even though vaccines are free.

And there you have it: Two completely illogical policies that are literally killing the residents of these areas. And for what noble purpose are these people sacrificing their lives? Perhaps they’re making a statement about “wokeness”. We heard it, loud and clear!

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, April 2.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,155,323

Average daily deaths last seven days: 203

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 322

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.1%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 106,249,748          

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 135,499 (19,357/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 142,211 (20,316/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.1% (0.1% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

The Times produced a great article this week about events at the CDC in early March 2023. Some staffers were in despair over the novel coronavirus. Of course, the whole world knew it could be deadly, and it was already clear it had appeared in the US. But this didn’t cause their despair, since the CDC had dealt successfully with deadly viruses before. The formula was tried and true: You quarantine anyone who has symptoms of being infected, as well as anyone who has been in close contact with an infected person.

However, these CDC staff members, as well as others in Europe (and probably some in China), had learned that the virus could spread asymptomatically. In other words, there would now be no way to quarantine everyone who was infected, since they themselves wouldn’t know they were infected until they started experiencing symptoms.

But even this realization didn’t cause them to despair, since it would just be another obstacle to overcome, not the end of the fight. The cause of their despair was that the “leadership” (to use the term loosely) of the CDC also knew about this, yet had clearly decided they didn’t want to let the rest of the country know about it. This determination was clearly led by the White House, so the staff members weren’t going to be able to do anything about it:

“All of us knew tens of thousands were going to die, and we were helpless to stop it,” said Dr. Daniel Wozniczka, one of the trainees. “It was really heartbreaking and difficult on a psychological level not to be able to do anything.”

Of course, this statement was just a little off. Tens of thousands didn’t die; hundreds of thousands did, for a total of over a million (and still counting, albeit more slowly. Thank God for small favors, as my former boss used to say). And the US has the highest Covid death numbers per capita of any major country other than Brazil.

The next time someone refers to Covid as a medical disaster, be sure to correct them. This was a political disaster, pure and simple. Four years ago, anyone proposing a movie script with a storyline like that would have been laughed out of the studio.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, March 19.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,151,642

Average daily deaths last seven days: 119

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 289

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.1%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 105,972,038          

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 80,699 (11,528)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 288,342 (41,192)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.1% (0.3% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

The Wall Street Journal published a good article recently, summarizing where the US stands in terms of the Covid death rate. Here are the main points it makes:

1.      The death rate remains at 400 per week, which is almost exactly what it’s been since March 2022. Not going up, but certainly not going down, either.

2.      The number of “excess deaths” (i.e. deaths above what would normally be expected at this time of the year) is more than would be expected from just looking at the Covid death rate. A clue why this might be the case is the fact that Covid is listed as a contributing cause in many cases of heart disease and cancer (the two leading causes of death, with Covid holding its own at number 3, thank you very much). So, if you do catch Covid (especially if you’re old), be sure to hope that you don’t develop heart disease or cancer.

3.      Older people are most likely to die (of course that’s always been the case, except during the Delta wave, when it seems younger people were much more likely to die. I’m guessing that’s because by the time delta hit – the summer of 2021 – the older people were almost all vaccinated, but the young weren’t, and they were devasted by the much more easily transmissible delta variant).

4.      Nursing home residents are especially likely to die; in fact, 270 of those average weekly deaths are among nursing home residents. However, only 53% of those residents have received the bivalent booster shot. I don’t get it. Why should it be optional for a nursing home resident to be up-to-date on their boosters? If they think vaccination is some sort of woke conspiracy, let them go home. Why keep them around, where they’ll get sick and infect the other residents, as well as the staff?

5.      Which were the two states with the lowest vaccination rates? Two of the states with the highest percentage of old people: Arizona and Florida. Go figure.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, February 26.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,145,365

Average daily deaths last seven days: 396

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 368

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.2%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 104,986,098          

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 274,409 (39,201/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 219,245 (31,321/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3% (0.2% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

Thisarticle in the NY Times tries to answer the question, “How Deadly Was China’s Covid Wave?” This question needs to be asked, since the official number is a ridiculously low 83,150 (for the whole pandemic, although the number before this wave was less than 10,000). Based on four different models, experts estimated that between 970,000 and 1.6 million people died of Covid during the wave (which has now subsided).

Of course, this is bad, but what’s most revealing is a chart comparing some major world countries for their Covid death rates per 100,000 population. China is about in the middle of this list, with either 68 or 110 deaths per 100,000 population (those are based on the low and high estimates of the recent wave, respectively). And which country is at the top? You got it: the US with 337 deaths per 100,000 population, followed closely by Brazil with 330 deaths.

Speaking of US deaths, I just noticed (since I didn’t update my numbers last week) that Covid deaths were about 50% higher in January than they were in December. This doesn’t constitute a huge wave, but it certainly doesn’t indicate that we don’t have to worry about Covid anymore.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, February 12.

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,140,017

Average daily deaths last seven days: 529

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 193

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 104,766,853          

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 278,016 (39,717/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 127,558 (18,223/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3% (0.1% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

There’s been a lot written about the fact that six in ten Covid deaths are now among vaccinated people. Does this mean that vaccines don’t work? Obviously, if that’s true, it fits in very nicely with a certain political narrative (not mine, to be sure).

However, my college roommate Mike Howard, just retired as a philosophy professor at the University of Maine, sent me the link to thisarticle, which explains why more detailed analysis of the numbers shows just the opposite: that being vaccinated and boosted provides the best protection possible from dying if you catch Covid. Here are a few of the reasons why this is the case:

First, older people are much more likely to be vaccinated than younger people, and they’re also much more likely to die if they get Covid. That in itself gives a big bias to the numbers. The real question is how many more older people would die if they weren’t vaccinated, and the answer is clearly “a whole lot”.

Second, if you’ve been vaccinated but haven’t had a booster within the past year, you don’t have much immunity left from your vaccination. So you have to get the booster. And now it looks like we’ll need to get a Covid booster every year, just like some of us get a flu shot every year. Of course, the difference is that Covid is still much more deadly than the flu, so if you’ve gotten along without the flu shot so far and don’t think you need one, you shouldn’t assume you don’t need a Covid booster (and by the way, “booster” is really a misnomer. There’s no chemical difference between vaccination shots and boosters).

Third, as we all know, vaccination doesn’t prevent Covid infection, nor does it prevent death from Covid. So the fact that the percentage of people who die of Covid and are vaccinated has risen is in large part just a reflection of the fact that the percentage of people who are vaccinated has risen since vaccinations were introduced. Think about it: If 100% of the population were vaccinated, would every death from Covid be evidence that the vaccines don’t work?

Obviously not. But, to test that idea, you would have to compare deaths from Covid in a vaccinated population with deaths in an unvaccinated one. If the numbers of deaths were the same (and if the number of cases were the same), you could say there’s no advantage to vaccination. Of course, nobody can conduct such an experiment, but the US very graciously “consented” to do the next best thing two years ago: demonstrate that a population with a relatively large percentage of unvaccinated people will have a much higher death rate. And guess what? The US has the second-highest Covid mortality rate (after Brazil) of any large country. The experiment was successful!

By the way, this means I need to apologize to all the unvaccinated people in the US who have died of Covid. I had thought they were just being stubborn in not getting vaccinated, but now I know they had selflessly volunteered to be part of the control group in this huge experiment. It cost them their lives, but it advanced science, which I’m sure will be a great comfort to their families…

Also, I want to point out that Mike has been one of the foremost advocates of Universal Basic Income for decades – and now it looks like the idea is gaining a lot of momentum (in fact the child tax credit implemented during the worst of the pandemic, but unfortunately not renewed last year, was in many ways a test – quite successful – of that idea). Mike recently published a good articleon UBI on Scientific American’s online service.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

Since early April 2022, as we were coming down from the huge Omicron deaths numbers of January through March, US Covid deaths have varied within a tight range of 250-600 per day (with the great majority of weeks falling in the 300-450 range). Since even this range is too high (flu deaths are on average less than 100 per day), I’ve been looking for the numbers to go below 250 – and stay below that for some time – before I’ll say the pandemic is over in the US.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is we’ve finally broken out of the range! But the bad news is we’ve broken out of the topof the range, not the bottom. Last week, there were an average of 625 deaths per day.

Of course, this might be a transient phenomenon. But unless we suddenly go back to the bottom of the range and stay there, I’m not going to say the pandemic is over (even though Joe Biden did last fall. This was great fodder for the GOP, since this wasn’t an official government declaration. If the pandemic were officially declared to be over, some pandemic programs like student loan deferments would have to end). And I’m going to keep wearing a mask in public indoor spaces.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, January 15.