It's been a while since I took a look at the latest COVID-19 numbers, so let's do that. The powers that be have decided that the best metric is no longer cases or deaths, but hospitalizations, so here are hospitalization rates in the US plus the five biggest Western European countries:
Everybody is way down from the early January peak and hospitalizations are still dropping. So things are looking pretty good.
As an added bonus, here's another chart showing each surge of COVID since the start of the pandemic:
The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the Omicron surge was that it would be severe but short. That's been more or less borne out in the US, where the peak was the highest ever but the curve goes up and down quite sharply. However, it's worth noting that (a) the Omicron surge wasn't way sharper than previous surges, and (b) other countries have had surges that were just as sharp as the US omicron surge.
I don't have anything to make of this aside from thinking that the sharpness of COVID surges varies quite a bit in different countries at different times. I'm not sure our Omicron surge was really anything out of the ordinary.
If you meant to suggest that the Omicron surge wasn't much higher, that's a different story that the sharpness of the surge. But surely a simple line from start to peak will show a sharper surge for Omicron. Better yet, do an Y/X comp.
peak width at half height...and it's sharper...
If you look at time above, say, 200 admits/week/million, i.e. when it was really bad, then not that much of a difference between Delta and Omicron.
We're finally starting to see some counties getting down to only "modest" levels of community spread. Appalachia and Washington state still have Omicron hanging on--as does Idaho which still has insane levels of spread (down from batshitcrazy levels). Do have some reporting artifacts from Presidents' Day, and CovidActNow has RI at 20 new cases/day/100K yet the best county there is at 28.....oops?
Hospitalizations and ICU usage both falling--but level still high in places that are or are going to be lifting mask mandates. They're getting out over their skis.
CDC updated recommendations presuming most people have some immunity now. Higher levels of community transmission considered ok now, just so long as people are not ending up in the hospital. I'd have liked to see this update with a delayed implementation--i.e. give the staff working the ICU's and hospitals a bit of a break before endemic spread ticks up.
Eastern Washington & the Coplandia known as Idaho are quickly replacing Portland, OR, Metro as the Capital of ANTIVAXXXIA.
Not surprised Gem State excess deaths among the physically deteriorated are rising, allegedly due to the FAKENEWS BIOWEAPONIZED INTENTIONALLY LABLEAKED CHINAVIRUS.
In terms of new cases Washington went from being one of the highest states to one of the lowest in just a few days.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
If you plotted this data on a logarithmic scale, which is the better way to compare rates of growth, you'd see that the rise in December and January was not much faster than the rise in July and August. It just happened on a higher range of numbers, which makes it that much steeper on a linear scale.
What is really different, in my opinion, is the rapidity of the decline from the peak. That suggests that the population susceptible to serious illness is now smaller. The more efficient transmission of Omicron let it penetrate that population very quickly, but then it ran out of people to infect faster than the virus of earlier waves.
Here is my concern: The level now (in cases also) is still above the trough of summer 2021. Things sent straight up again from there. What makes anybody think that this time will be different?
We have seen the mask on, mask off cycle several times and every time we were forced to go mask on within a few weeks.
Really: Where does this optimism come from?
Are you a retard??? Masks on don't do a thing in low transmission environment. All data is lagging data.
This wave is going away faster than previous waves.
More people have been fully vaccinated now then in summer 2021.
More people have been infected and now have immunity.
Anyway, pandemics do go away. Maybe we're not there yet on this one, but we might be close.
I hope my HTML tags worked, and the above looks like a bulleted list. If that failed, sorry! Still hopeful about the pandemic!
Right now there doesn't seem to be a new variant to follow on after Omicron. It may be that the virus is following in the footsteps of the Spanish flu and mutating into a less harmful variant.
The similarity of the various national curves suggests the unimportance of particular policies.