Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through June 4. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
The new case rate in the US is going down steadily and is now lower than it's been since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. If this keeps up, our mortality rate should keep dropping too. We just need to get our vaccination rate back up for a while and we should be very close to finally crushing the virus for good, although we still have at least a year of work, maybe more, to inoculate the rest of the world as well.
I noticed that Marin County California has an unusually high vaccination rate and thought I’d check out their County statistics:
https://coronavirus.marinhhs.org/vaccine/data
98% of their over 65 population has had at least one shot, so basically fully vaccinated. 87.5% of the 12 and over population have had at least one dose. This is especially impressive since Marin County has been sort of a hotbed for anti-vas behavior in the past and had a measles outbreak because lots of people weren’t getting their kids vaccinated.
Interesting. Maybe the measles outbreak immunized the community to vaccine-phobia.
Well, autism can't onset that late in life.
(I do like those NIMBYite douchecanoes so clearly demonstrating the malleability of their deeply held beliefs, though.)
It will be interesting to see to what extent they will be getting the under 12 population vaccinated once that is available.
Yes, indeed.
My geologist uncle & his almost equally nutty wife never vaxxx'd my two cousins, but as grandparents of two children with Celiac, they are not so beholden to homeopathy as they were with their own kids.
Just googling around I can't readily find anything like a single global number, but from the maps and charts I can find it looks like 80% of the world's population has not received any vaccination at all. That's 5 billion people. So it's myopic to think we're close to crushing the virus for good. That's the kind of talk that leads to new outbreaks. And these unvaxxed people are not "hesitant": They just don't have access to the vaccine. Locals in North America and Europe might feel good about finally taking off masks and eating in restaurants, but I hope leaders in those countries can forget about reelection long enough to mount a serious global vaccination outreach.
So it's myopic to think we're close to crushing the virus for good.
Kevin was very clearly referring to the United States. Given that negative covid results have to be submitted for entry into the country from abroad, it's not "myopic" to think we could be on the path to squelching the pandemic domestically, even if, in sheer moral terms, this is far from adequate.
Point taken, but the world is not the United States, much as we may wish it to be. Completely aside from moral matters, if the virus is alive anywhere, it's likely to come here and bite us.
Point taken, but the world is not the United States, much as we may wish it to be
I don't wish that. Do you?
if the virus is alive anywhere, it's likely to come here and bite us.
Hence the need for persons entering the country to submit negative covid results (or proof of vaccination). It remains to be seen how close the country ultimately approaches herd immunity, but if we can get there, the fact that the virus hasn't been squelched in other countries need not translate into large-scale outbreaks domestically.
Maybe it's not full-out myopic to think we could be on the path to squelching the pandemic domestically, but it's overlooking some persistent dangers.
Covid tests, like all others, can have false negatives. A certain number of people coming in from abroad will be infected and slip through. And given that the US never developed a meaningful test-and-trace program, and the economic interests pushing for resumption of international travel will resist mandatory quarantine for international arrivals, that person can give rise to local outbreaks. Meanwhile, as the pandemic rages in the rest of the world, if a strain that breaks through the protection offered by vaccines should evolve, we could find ourselves back at square one.
This is similar to the scenario that Taiwan is currently facing, where a single international pilot with a false-negative covid test broke a required quarantine and then became a superspreader. The Taiwanese population is almost entirely unvaccinated. The difference there is that they do have an excellent test and trace system, so it is possible, though not guaranteed, that they will get this outbreak under control before all hell breaks loose.
Absolutely critical consideration.
No it isn't
You can't have a strain to break vaccinations. You need a totally different virus.
And the positivity rate? But a single datapoint but was at a testing site in Santa Clara county CA the other day and it was nearly empty.
The Johns Hopkins site shows positivity rate dropping all over the country and in California.
I guess that in some places, not many people have any reason to get tested lately.
That Johns Hopkins chart: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/california
Quite high... among the unvaccinated.
The positivity rate has been dropping in Santa Clara County and is now down to 0.4%. See for yourself: https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-testing
Here's a walking around video from Paris from yesterday,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-wKwypB8R0
Most people are wearing masks.
I saw a coupla hijab.
I expect Marianne Lepin to make hay from this.
There's no reason the vaccination rate in the United States should be expected to rise at this point. If it doesn't drop too rapidly, the percent vaccinated can still go up.
I do wonder what Alabama is trying to prove.
Half the state is trying to prove that Harvey Updyke, Jr., did nothing wrong. The other half is drafting a movement to secede from the union & make Tommy Tuberville supreme leader of the Montgomery Caliphate.
I've learned a lot today.
If Republicans were in charge of the fire department they'd refuse to do anything about fires and would try to make people hate the existence of fire departments because what buildings need is herd immunity.
No, like in the glibertarian utopia, where the fire department would be funded by subscriptions, & only paid-up members could get fire aid, the vaccine would not be free, with only paid-up individuals able to inoculate (should they want to*).
*True, even here, most subscribers would still favor echinacaea, or other herbs, or folk remedy apart those, to ward off the Rona.
Periodically you read about some idiot town that eliminated it's fire department insisting that a volunteer fire department would work great and they wouldn't have to pay for it, and then, even this this fails as ludicrously as you'd think, these idiots will continue to insist it's far better to not pay taxes and burn than to pay taxes at all.
'even when this fails'.
I guess there must be a great many "idiot towns" out there... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_fire_department#United_States
Volunteers within a publicly organized department that also contains full-time firefighters, rather than just farming it all out to the Moose Lodge.
Having grown up in a area with volunteer fire departments--all but larger cities run that way. Basically hire drivers and EMT's, but everyone else needed to man the hoses show up when called out. Yes, they are trained and are given a stipend for showing up.
It went from a siren alerting the local volunteers to how up to the fire house, to the use of pages, and now, smart phones. The still have their local fund raisers--bazaars, bingo, dinners, etc.--for equipment, help for injured/fallen members and their families, etc.
How does living in an area where you have to wait for the volunteers to turn up affect homeowners insurance?
to cld--
I think distance from the nearest fire hydrant, or if a tanker truck is needed, makes a bigger difference.
Response times aren't that bad--one or two will probably beat the truck out, esp. after business hours when they're home. Ok, in rural areas, both the fire trucks and volunteers may take a while to get to remote homes.
Wow, are you ignorant about how this works. No shame, since you clearly have no experience with it, but shame for making pronouncements based on your limited experience.
Volunteer fire departments are fantastic and very, very effective in putting out fires. Most of my state of VT is protected by them. No fire hydrants, either, but land owners are strongly encouraged in various ways to maintain large ponds, from which the tankers suck up water to put out nearby fires.
And no, they don't have a couple paid "professionals" guiding them. They do require extensive training.
Get out of your urban/suburban bubble, please.
I admit if they require extensive training and are publicly organized it doesn't really fit with my impression of the concept 'volunteers'. More like hobbyists, or the Freemasons.
Looks like WY will be last state standing above 10 new cases/day/100K!
Vaccines: MS still below 35%--and the needle basically isn't moving...
Same for (most) the eight states below 40% vaccinated (first shot, total population)
Biden's metric: 70% of adults, first shot by 4th of July: WA should cross that threshold today.
DC and NY should cross it next week--but hard to say with vaccination rates dropping.
IL, MN and VA should be there the week after next.
The country is at ca. 63.4 (via CDC covid data tracker). We'd hit Joe's target if we were running just above 0.2% injected per day--but we're falling below that. Some of the incentive programs are reported to be working--maybe that will show up in the numbers over the next week or so....
Am about to step into the Red Robin Burgers by Vancouver Mall in Washington State, & refuse to even ask if I, vaxxx'd (at Oregon Convention Center since April 25), can go maskless. So many Patriot Pride & alt-medicine types here in Antivaxxxia, the low paid restaurant staff already get enough grief from the unvaxxx'd. They don't need my shit.
Definitely mask up in stores until both fully vaccinated % high and caseload low.
Of course, those who are/will get vaccinated will keep wearing masks, those who forsake the vaccination won't....
CLD, maybe you need to rethink your concept of "volunteers" then. Also, apparently, your concept of "publicly organized." In my book, volunteers are people who voluntarily join up to something to do something worthwhile on their own time, and are not paid. Are folks in a town who come together to do something worthwhile "publicly organized" by definition? How about, for instance, the unpaid but professional level choruses that many major symphony orchestras have? Are those "volunteers" or not? Are they "publicly organized"? What's your definition of "public" anyway?
I am sorry to have gotten off on this semantic tangent about something I think shouldn't exist, but yes. Volunteers are entirely untrained and mostly unsupervised people who go out and pick up trash along the highway, and that's great. For anything more important you need some kind of accountability and that's where the participants in the activity, firefighters or chorus, have to become something higher than amateur. They don't let just anyone in the chorus. There is no chorus on Earth that would have me, but if it were all really voluntary I could just turn up and damage society at the top of my lungs and no one could do anything about it.
If you happen to be a professional and you're volunteering somewhere, that's an entirely different thing. The significant training requirement of volunteer firefighters sounds like they could be professionals with little more effort, which begs the question about how really 'volunteery' they are. Despite the name is this something more like private contractors who volunteer not to get paid? And then there's the equipment, which I assume doesn't volunteer itself and which has to be up to state and local regulations, and which has to be kept somewhere.
But, my offhand remark had to do with places that dump their public fire departments and try to make up for it with a volunteer service, which, now that I think of it, is probably mostly a gimmick to wreck a union.