Category: Covid–19 Page 12 of 21

Our benefactor writes

Lots of headlines that we have reached 100,000 cases. Not if you don’t include Guam, Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. Our announcement will be tomorrow. It’s an awful milestone. I expected the mortality rate to start dropping dramatically, given the increases in testing, but that’s not yet happening.

Our benefactor notes that the US should hit 100K deaths on Thursday or Friday.

Our benefactor notes that the seven day average is still going up. We’ll see if it continues. Remember that many states are essentially allowing uncontrolled spread. States that are serious about controlling this are going to have to put in border controls.

Our benefactor notes that there is “a definite increase in the number of cases, but one day is not sufficient to tell what’s going on…yet.”

Plus ca change.

So, testing has occurred in European countries to determine what percentage of the population has Covid-19 antibodies:

•Spain 5%

•Italy 5%

•Sweden 5%

•Holland 3.5%

•Denmark 1%

•Norway 1%

•Ireland 6%

You will recall that Italy has had one of the worst outbreaks in the world. To get to herd immunity (assuming it’s possible for Covid-19), you’d need about 80 percent of the population to have antibodies; that means 16X more than have them now. Given that Italy had multiple hospitals overwhelmed, this means either a long time or a hell of a lot of dead people, or both. Even if the death rate didn’t soar (it would), you’d be talking about approximately 480K deaths.

This means there are only two ways to get rid Covid-19 under control:

• You get cases to zero or very near zero, and you have robust contact tracing and quarantine procedures if any new cases happen. This is the road Vietnam took (so far they have zero deaths, though it looks like they might wind up with one.)
• You get a working vaccine.

That’s it.

Well, there’s a third way, you go through multiple waves so that almost everyone catches it, meaning that you get much, much larger death tolls than we’ve had already.

So, don’t expect this to go away quickly if you’re in a bungler country which didn’t crush Covid-19 into the dirt and which refused to track, trace, quarantine, and mandate masks.

And if you live in one of those countries, expect that you aren’t traveling anywhere outside those countries without a two-week quarantine (if even that is allowed by your destination country) until there is a vaccine.

There are respected scientists on both sides of the “can we get a vaccine to this” question. My sense is that if we can, it’s about a year to eighteen months out before mass issue. Hopefully, it isn’t a company in the American IP zone that produces it, or they’ll try and make a trillion + by charging everyone through the nose for it.

Meanwhile, this situation is going to keep going on and on, especially if you’re in a bungler country. Americans, you’re in a Bungler country. Brits, same.

Be well, make your plans appropriately.