It’s not obvious from the media coverage, but the coronavirus numbers are getting better. It’s no surprise. We could have predicted before Thanksgiving that the coronavirus winter would look like a three-humped camel. And if new variants do not blast us in the coming weeks, we can expect that maybe we are on a long, final downslope out of this virus.
Here’s the daily number of cases in the United States. That big mountain in recent months is the three-humped camel, and we shouldn’t be at all surprised if daily cases continue to plummet.
You can see this autumn-into-winter as having three surges (in reddish) and three recoveries (in greenish).
1) Cold weather ushered in the first surge, which lasted from early October to late November and took us from 130,000 cases per day to 540,000 cases per day — a horrible quadrupling in 7 weeks. Then that wave started to fade away, and maybe we would have gone way down to 130,000 per day.
2) But the post-Thanksgiving surge hit after only a few days of recovery. We went from 490,000 per day to 660,000 per day between Nov. 30 and Dec. 18. That Thanksgiving surge didn’t trigger a runaway outbreak. It was a 2 1/2-week outbreak that started to dissipate.
Cases fell from 660,000 to 551,000 per day and maybe would have continued falling if the post-Christmas surge hadn’t hit.
3) We went from 550,000 to 750,000 per day in 10 days. Then we peaked and started falling again. Since Jan. 11, cases have fallen almost every single day for two weeks, and we are now at 515,000 cases per day, which is lower than where we were when the Christmas surge began and nearly where we were when the Thanksgiving surge began.
That is, this virus is trying to fade into the background, thanks probably to masks and social distancing, but our large indoor family gatherings keep bringing it back. (I hate saying this because I think large family gatherings are just about the best thing in the world.)
Will we get a Super Bowl surge? Probably an uptick, but hopefully that won’t last two weeks, given that the Superbowl is only a few hours. Also, it will hopefully start from a much lower base than the Thanksgiving or Christmas surges started, given that we may have 12 more days of falling numbers from today.
Throw in the 2% of the population getting vaccinated every week, and there’s good reason to hope daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are on a one-way trip to negligible. God willing.
