Number of COVID cases in the US dropping
Here’s a discussion of why. It’s based on this WSJ article which I can’t reach because of a paywall. Here are some quotes from the WSJ piece, appearing in the RedState post:
Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.
Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast…
At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.
But will the government allow Americans to resume normal life? I doubt it – and even if they do, the new thing that Americans are instructed to fear is Trump supporters, who are obviously violent insurrectionists as well as kulaks.
I just found a link to that article this morning on Facebook, of all places. I liked this part: “Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.”
I appeared before the Omaha City Council to try to get them to stop the mask mandate at the end of March.
I told them masks don’t work and showed them the chart for Omaha. I also noted that JNJ should be distributing its vaccine soon. (A major failure by the Biden Adm!)
Cornhead lost, 7-0.
Just like Alex Berenson said. This virus was going to burn itself out.
Even if herd immunity is achieved, everyone gets the vaccine, and the virus does indeed burn itself out, the mask mandates and lockdowns will continue, and enough people who wrongly believe the virus is a death sentence will run to get tested whenever they come down with the sniffles.
The inherent false positive rate of the test will thus continue to churn out “new cases” which the media will breathlessly report on (likely calling them cases of “new variants”) and the politicians will use to justified continued edicts.
This is never going to end in our lifetimes.
Most restrictions will probably end in red states but for those of us in blue states they will probably never totally end.
Will Disneyland ever open in California? Will California ever have full attendance concerts and sporting events?
Didn’t they also recently change the way testing would be used to determine if someone was infected or not? I think I heard they had to run the sample multiple times and if 1 out of 25 had a reaction, it was a “positive” test. I heard they dropped the number of sample runs to 5 which can also be attributed to the drop in “detected” cases.
eeyore mood:
I seem to recall something about a change in the rules about how to report deaths. I don’t remember a change in rules about positive cases, but it’s certainly possible. Do you have a link?
WHO and I think the CDC talked about changing the PCR test thresholds like a couple days after the inauguration. Of course this has been known since the end of August last year when the New York Times published an article about how the tests were catching a bunch of false positives or very weak positives.
The response to that was crickets.
Laura Ingraham had a guest on a couple days ago, the Yale professor perhaps, who blanketly stated that he believed nationwide immunity was at around 50%. No explanation.
Here is a CDC chart: The Nationwide Commercial Laboratory Seroprevalence Survey
The CDC goes to the major blood testing labs in the USA and randomly tests the existing blood samples for antibodies. Permission? We don’t need no steenking permissions!
The highest number on that chart is 24% immunity in Wisconsin. This chart is updated about every 2 weeks, and the numbers went up greatly in the last update. I’ll be interested to see the next update in a couple or few days. Any bets on the chart being discontinued if the numbers get really high?
I wonder if they try to avoid testing blood from vaccinated people. If they were serious about being random, that might be hard to do.
So I wonder if we ever needed the vaccines? And do people still need to get vaccinated.
I’m very doubtful that Covid cases have dropped by 77%.
They never were anywhere near as much as ‘reported’.
False positives and classifying Flu as Covid, evidenced by an ‘official’ 15% flu rate and a 2020 death toll less than in the years 2019 -2015. Yet with an increasing population over that time period, puts the lie to the Covid scam.
eeyore and Neo, I think it’s a combination of what everyone has stated: 1) Natural immunity building, 2) vaccinations, and 3) the change in CDC guidelines on PCR testing.
My latest data for the last couple of days shows the acceleration of cases changing from -4400 cases/day^2 down to about -3100 cases/day^2. So we should see a bit of a flattening of the curve. Not surprising as historically these curves are Gaussian so eventually flatten out towards zero…but never reach zero. That mathematical fact will probably keep us masked up forever if the Dems have their way. Gotta keep those deplorables under control. We all need to move to Florida or South Dakota.
At some point the testing thing needs to stop especially for young healthy populations. Major League Baseball is reporting for Spring Training this week and so far they have done over 6,660 tests and have had 13 positives, 9 players 4 staffers (they are testing every one from coaches to office staff to groundskeepers) and they are going to keep on testing and testing. What a ridiculous waste.
@Beth Lopez:
No.
Yes. You WILL get your vaccine and you WILL be happy.
🙂
I vote Cornhead for Tribune of the Plebs.
You, Sir, must have the patience of a saint to be willing to attempt to talk sense to those spineless ignorant idiots.
Do want to see some sneaky COVID propaganda? From MSN:
This is a lie isn’t it? Because the home is high on the list.
Oh, wait. What they really said was that there are these 5 places and they
areinclude 1) hotels; 2) churches; and 3) the group restaurants, bars, and cafes.If our counting confused you, you won’t wonder where #4 and #5 went.
Alright, why am I looking at MSN.com? I’m slumming it so Neo won’t have to. (Not that she would.)
A link to the change of testing.
https://redstate.com/michael_thau/2021/01/20/total-coincidence-alert-who-issues-new-c19-guidelines-requiring-2nd-test-for-symptom-less-on-day-biden-takes-office-n313400
Misremembered some details but the change happened just after Biden was inaugurated.
@TommyJay:
Go and scrub your eyeballs. Gently, gently now.
Neo probably does read MSN so that we don’t have to. She’s clearly very methodical and patient. Which is why she needs to follow up on this idea of having a daily open comment thread.
*rubs hands with glee*
Open comment thread:
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”
“Get off my lawn!”
“I’ve always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.”
“Bang!”
Mr. Rogers visits with Mr. Grand Torino.
I’ve suggested on open thread here starting Saturday night into Monday since our host usually takes Sunday off and it often seems that one of her Saturday posts invariably goes way off topic anyway.
“Get off my lawn! The garden gnomes have been telling me all about you and your kind!”
“Dear Agony Aunt: I’ve planted Claymores and tripwires in my front lawn. Should I cancel my First Things Subscription or is the Misznay-Schardin Effect a manifestation of Logos?”
Once a week will hardly do justice to all the possibilities. But moderation in all things, I guess. Err….
Funny stuff guys.
MSN does have the occasional article from NYTimes or WaPo that Neo would cover, but this BGR with Andy Meek is beneath her. In a few months time BGR with be replaced by MPZ with Candy Timid.
Preexisting immunity, immunity through infection, and vaccination, albeit the last well after reaching the community immunity threshold. Also, early, inexpensive, effective, low-risk treatments (e.g. HCQ cocktail, Ivermectin protocol) to mitigate disease progression and deny safe sanctuary for viral transmission. Accurate testing and attribution. Closing Planned Parent/hood, one of the few venues where there were excess deaths.
Griffin – “Will Disneyland ever open in California? Will California ever have full attendance concerts and sporting events?”
When they replace the governor or the state goes bankrupt. It is pretty bad when even the illegals leave the state because it sucks worse than Mexico.
Remember that the consequence of changing the test parameters required for a ”positive” COVID-19 test result (i.e. raising the threshold of virus material reported in the sample) not only lowers the number of “positive” test results, but also has the knock-on effect of lowering the deaths associated with infection. In a single policy step, lowering the bar on COVID-19 testing favorably altered the outcome, but in a completely artificial way. The future graphs showing infection and mortality will therefore contain a data artifact that makes it appear as if things took a profound turn for the better, when in fact they just changed the way they were counting heads.
Aggie:
Almost like counting votes?
“We all need to move to Florida or South Dakota.” physicsguy
In California indoor worship at churches has been forbidden. As of October 25th, I could no longer go along with what I consider the non-faith, non-science approach constructed for Mass attendance at my local parish. Thankfully my husband had come across the Cathedral in Sioux Falls, SD so we have been “attending” via YouTube every Sunday. I love Bishop Donald DeGrood. Wear a mask, don’t wear a mask. Sit near, sit apart. Exercise adult wisdom. This makes sense to me in a faith setting. And I state this as a person who stopped crossing myself with the holy water, no longer shook hands for the sign of peace or received the common cup when the ebola scare happened in 2014. It may be down the memory hole, but then President Obama had the military going into ground zero and people were coming in with the infection and being treated at the local hospitals. It wasn’t lost on me that our government and the Catholic hierarchy weren’t doing anything in response to the possible outbreak. Crickets. What a difference a Republican (I mean, Trump) administration makes.
I think this is true. But…
We speak of groups, yet groups are made of individual stories. Later today, I will meet with lifelong friends to talk about a memorial service for the man who was the best man at my wedding and my friend since 1967. He succumbed to COVID last week, after traveling to meet friends over Christmas/New Year’s with his partner, where they both contracted the virus. She shook it off, but he did not.
As a young man, he beat Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and it changed his view of life and gave him a wisdom that most of us do not acquire until a much older age. He was a better friend to me than I was to him, which is true for most of if not all of his friends. In his time, he rewired city buses, climbed to the tops of most tall buildings in my city, played The Rite Of Spring and Mahler 5 for money in an orchestra, taught youngsters how to dress a stage and go up top while not killing themselves in the process, drove endless hours of dance clubs with the funk lines emerging from his bass, built a garage for his Mom pretty much by himself, and spent hundreds of hours looking at me over breakfast while we discussed how to fix the problems of this sinful world.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
In thinking of this, I ask myself if I knew then what I know now say, two years ago, would I level China to the ground with all the people in it to have him back? How much time do I spend considering the consequences of outsourcing something as dangerous as gain of function research to the Wild West of Chinese medical and professional ethics? How angry am I at the people who are still smiling, pretending that everything is OK under their management like Nick Leeson sitting on $800 billion of futures losses before reality finally caught up with him? Oh, and telling us whether we can make a living or leave our house.
“Go live your life, but don’t forget to check with us first to get permission. After all we’re taking good care of you.”
Yeah. Sure. You guys are doing some terrific job.
Fyi, I have frequently been able to bypass a payroll by using an incognito window. I’ve only tried it on my phone so I don’t know if it’d work on a computer browser, but my husband and I both read that WSJ article on our phones that way.
You can often read paywalled WSJ articles by putting the title in a search engine.
Sharon W, I may never go back to “passing the peace,” which was not my favorite moment anyhow. (So many times it seemed insincere.) I will clasp my hands together near my chest, nod and smile. No more shaking every hand or doing the European hug and cheek kiss thing. COVID will pass, but I don’t believe flu has been vanquished.
I do think a lot of little things like shaking hands or hugging of people you don’t know well will likely decline post COVID for sure but I think a lot of the changes people are predicting are from certain. I predict that at some point in a year or two a lot of stories will appear about how a lot of these remote working setups are affecting productivity and at some point a drift back toward offices will happen.
Texan99:
I used to be able to access WSJ stories that way, but I haven’t been able to do it successfully in years.
Hitting ESC multiple times while a page from “Epoch Times” is loading can get you past the paywall. So far.
For other websites, if you’ve got Evernote Web Clipper installed, hitting the Clip elephant icon works about half the time to load the page into an Evernote simplified article (which I prefer to read anyway).
mezzrow, I’m so sorry. What an astonishing person. I’m glad you had the chance to know him and that we had the chance to read your eloquent memories, which I hope bring some comfort.
Not sure how he did it but my daughter’s boyfriend got me past the WSJ paywall through a public library subscription. Something to do with the ‘interwebs’. This library happens to be several thousand miles from where I actually live. The first time it lasted about 6 months, the last fix is still going strong after 9. If anyone here knows how to jump into one of these group library subscriptions maybe they can clue us in.
I am very mistrustful of ‘remote’ work. Right now my kids and friend’s kids with well paying jobs that can be done remotely are loving it. Since April I have had a pretty much constant stream of them staying with me in Hawaii. They will stay for a month or two, get up early, work 5-7 hours and have the afternoons and weekends in Paradise. Some of them have gone on to rent apts or condos for a much longer stay. Now, I love having them. They cook dinners and help in the garden. But I am worried for them.
Because, the trouble is, when trouble comes it’s going to take them by surprise. These same companies that are saving a bundle on office rent and catered lunches for their techhies can also save by replacing them with H1-B’s, and these kids will never see it coming. Or shut down sections and move them to India, or where ever. They literally Will. Not. See. what is going on with their co workers and company and adapt accordingly.
And don’t get me started on the damage being done to college students.
Mezzrow, my condolences.