My COVID Times Diary: Here we go again!

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. ~ George Satayana

So here we go again, people haven’ learned, haven’t taken it seriously and the coronavirus has come roaring back.  Here is  the current state of affairs from the NY Times this weekend.

As you can see, this is the highest single number of infections in a single day.  The real issue of course is that  these numbers are increasing at an exponential rate and we’re one week out from Halloween, when people got together for parties and even went Trick or Treating.  Four weeks from Halloween is the Thanksgiving Holiday and you know families will get together and people will have parties.  Then four weeks later is the Christmas/New Years week and somewhere in between college students will be returning home from all over the country.  This, given Americans complete lake of disregard for the necessary precautions that need to be taken mean a really ugly beginning to 2021.

There is a delay of a couple of weeks from exposure to illness and another delay from illness to hospitalizations and deaths.  So around Thanksgiving you’ll see hospital ICU fill rates start to spike and between Thanksgiving and Christmas numbers of daily deaths will begin to spike.  And flu season hasn’t really kicked in yet.  This week we hit our 10 millionth infection in the United States, there have been over 230,000 deaths from COVID.  Those numbers are about to go up really fast.  And for those out there under the delusion that it’s just because of testing, well, on the day in the image above, testing was up 7%  over the previous 14 days, and as it shows, deaths were up 12%, infections up 57%.  Wear a mask my friends, do your part.

It’s not all bad news, Pfizer announced today that in their stage three trials they saw a 90% effective rate for the vaccine, now in another three weeks we’ll get the safety data information.  If that works out, well than Pfizer will ask for emergency approval to move forward.  They will be able to produce enough doses in 2020 for about 25 million people worldwide and that number would jump up into the billions of doses in 2021.  So although this is very encouraging news, if it pans out you’ll not likely get the vaccine until some time in mid to late 2021.  Still, it’s a better place than we were in last week.

Again, even with a vaccine, people need to wear masks and take precautions until a significant percentage of the population have received the vaccine.  So get used to and keep that mask on. ~ Rev Kane