The Pandemic Is Heading Toward a Strange In-Between Time

[BUtterfield 8 41,818]

Is the United States past the worst of the pandemic? Cases and hospitalizations have fallen in most states in the past few days, and vaccination news has brightened. Johnson & Johnson published trial data showing that its one-dose vaccine is safe and effective, and the Biden administration has bought 200 million additional vaccine doses from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, which already have approved vaccines. By the start of the next school year, every American adult who wants a vaccine should be able to get one. The data scientist Youyang Gu, whose pandemic models have been justly celebratedfor their performance, projects that the U.S. will reach herd immunity in late July.

The promise of summer vaccinations means that Americans can confidently plan for the end of the pandemic. The crisis is softening now, and America could crush it by autumn. What happens in between? The pandemic’s medium-term future remains the biggest outstanding question: March to May is the mystery.

The outlook is not all rosy. A consensus is developing that this window may be large enough to allow for another surge in cases, Kristian Andersen, an immunology professor at the private medical institute Scripps Research, told me. In fact, he expects such a surge, he said: The increased transmissibility of the U.K. variant makes any other outcome “unrealistic.”

The U.K. variant, which scientists call B.1.1.7, is “of grave concern,” he said: In every country it’s dominated, this variant has increased the disease’s reproduction number—R, a measure of how easily a disease spreads—by 50 percent. If R is higher than 1, then a surge is building. Right now, California has an R of 0.77, according to the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases. Were B.1.1.7 to become the dominant strain in California right now, Andersen said, the state would head back into a surge.

“The U.S. has never been at an effective reproduction number that would allow us to control the variant,” he said.

Even aside from the variant, predicting the virus’s fate in the spring is hard. To understand why, we can look at the stars.

Not astrology: I mean literally looking at the stars. When you peer through a telescope at Proxima Centauri, the sun’s nearest neighbor, you never see the star as it exists today. Its light takes time—4.2 years—to reach us and register in a measurable way.  

Try to determine what’s happening in the pandemic at any one moment—how many people are now infected with the virus, for instance—and you face the same problem. Pandemic data suffer a lag too, although biological math and human circumstance, not the vastness of space, determine their delay.

In practice, COVID-19 case and test data are a window to the recent past. On average, patients do not develop their first COVID-19 symptom until four or five daysafter exposure to the virus. Figure that it takes another day or two for someone to get tested, then another for the lab to run the test and deliver a result. The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic estimates that another one to three days elapse as the lab reports the result to the state and the state publishes it. This lengthy process means that someone who is reported to be sick today might have been infected a week or two ago.

This latency matters just as much when the pandemic news is good as when it’s bad—and in recent days, the news has been very good. In the past week, the average number of new cases a day has fallen by double-digit percentages in 38 states and by single-digit percentages in eight, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. (Cases are rising by double-digit percentages only in Texas and Washington.) Hospitalizations are a more timely measure of the pandemic’s spread and they, too, are falling in every state but Vermont and New Mexico. Even former hot spots are abating: In California, the average number of new cases has fallen by more than half since January 1.

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[Pop Music 20,540]

this is the hardest time for me as i've been VERY careful since March of last year (leaving the house maybe 1 or 2 times a week to pick up groceries ordered online or go for a drive) since my stepdad and I are both high risk

I miss my friends back home (I moved in 2019 and never made any friends before the pandemic) and want to meet my first nephew from my stepbrother (he is so unbelievably cute  )

[LilMonst3r 5,681]

I feel its gonna get worst because there are many people throwing secret parties and still doing the most. I have seen this one Gay dude on my instagram who's partying almost every other day and Its a bunch of gay people packed in a space. I get so aggravated, cause people really act like partying is essential to their lively hoods. 

[Noah 27,418]

Is one shot really enough? Didn’t the company that made the Vaccine say it takes around 3-5 Shots to be fully immune or something? I feel like the optimism of it possibly ending soon is alarming, considering another new strain might be spreading right now and we have no idea.

[LibraOctober98 3,505]

There's probably gonna be one more bad wave. And then things will get better I think 

[ThisGuyTony 34,866]

I wonder what’s gonna happen to mask wearing once we reach that time tho? 

[BUtterfield 8 41,818]

9 minutes ago, ThisGuyTony said:

I wonder what’s gonna happen to mask wearing once we reach that time tho? 

I for one will still be wearing masks in crowded areas

[sillynate 6,170]

31 minutes ago, BUtterfield 8 said:

I for one will still be wearing masks in crowded areas

I don’t think I’m ever gonna ditch them unless I see signs posted outside an establishment that says “no masks allowed” or something 

I’ve developed too much of a dependency confidence with them  

[PunkTheFunk 125,703]

There's going to be a third wave, I just know it.

[Delulu Rogers 7,662]

It really all depends on ppl. If the weather gets nice we can have everyone going out and partying September will be a rude awakening like it was last year. 

[Jose P 23,341]

5 minutes ago, sillynate said:

I don’t think I’m ever gonna ditch them unless I see signs posted outside an establishment that says “no masks allowed” or something 

I’ve developed too much of a dependency confidence with them  

Girl same, I would feel naked if I went out without a mask 

[Alannah 2,988]

The US is experiencing a pretty horrid winter. Once early spring breaks, we'll see another uprise in numbers before things look promising. 

Dan Levy just called out the Chicago pop-up bar, Replay, for hosting an unlicensed Schitt's Creek themed pop-up bar. Chicago's county has seen 466k cases since the start of the pandemic and is not even remotely close to being out of the woods. 

People are just tired of "quarantining" - "COVID vacations" are becoming so popular and it's really grossing me out. "i CaN'T lIvE mY lIfE iN fEaR" - great! If you stayed put for two weeks almost a year ago, we could all be living our lives.  And yet teachers in our area aren't even considered for vaccines yet and the district is calling for in person learning this week.

 

[Delulu Rogers 7,662]

7 minutes ago, PunkTheFunk said:

There's going to be a third wave, I just know it.

In Canada most likely cause our government is being dumb 

[Alannah 2,988]

6 minutes ago, sillynate said:

I don’t think I’m ever gonna ditch them unless I see signs posted outside an establishment that says “no masks allowed” or something 

I’ve developed too much of a dependency confidence with them  

The amount of cold and flu cases are supposedly down in drastic amounts from incorporating masks into our everyday life. I'm severely at risk with chronic bronchitis and asthma and usually get 3 bad episodes a year for 3-6 weeks at a time. Since wearing a mask when I absolutely have to go out, I haven't gotten sick once. I'll never go another cold and flu season without a mask again. 

[Luc 4,776]

48 minutes ago, Alannah said:

The amount of cold and flu cases are supposedly down in drastic amounts from incorporating masks into our everyday life. I'm severely at risk with chronic bronchitis and asthma and usually get 3 bad episodes a year for 3-6 weeks at a time. Since wearing a mask when I absolutely have to go out, I haven't gotten sick once. I'll never go another cold and flu season without a mask again. 

I get your situation, but for healthy people, isn't getting a virus that is not very harmful actually better than not getting the virus? As it may help build some immunity against more harmful viruses like covid-19?