Scientists are struggling to explain the major, ongoing drop in Covid cases nationwide, with experts pointing to a variety of explanations including possible herd immunity, compliance with mitigation orders and rising vaccination rates as possible causes.
Positive Covid tests skyrocketed throughout the fall and winter, with positive tests reaching a high of just under 300,000 one day in early January.
Following that peak, cases tumbled downward in what was effectively an unbroken decline in positive test results for two months. Daily cases late last week reached levels not seen since October. The decline appears to have leveled off, but rates remain significantly lower than at the beginning of January.
It is by far the most sustained drop the country has seen since the pandemic began, made all the more astonishing by the fact the drop began almost immediately after the end of the holidays. Public health officials had issued dire warnings that holiday get-togethers, increased travel and more face-to-face contact among Americans would lead to runaway transmission and death rates.
Yet Monday's roughly 53,500 new cases represented a 75% drop from the 213,239 cases observed on Christmas Eve.
Cause for major drop uncertain
The welcome news has nevertheless been perplexing for many scientists who are struggling to explain why Covid cases are plunging so sharply.
Robert Cook, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Florida, admitted that it's "hard to explain exactly what is the contributing the most" to the plunge.
"I do not think the country has reached herd immunity (although it is possible that a subset of the population who go out to bars, etc, has)," he said. "But I think the combination of vaccinations while people still follow social distancing protocols is helping."
Some health officials have proposed that the U.S. may indeed be reaching sufficient levels of immunity necessary to naturally blunt the virus’s progress. That argument was advanced by Johns Hopkins Prof. Marty Makary in a Feb. 19 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. "At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life," Makary wrote.
However, Cristian Koepfli, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame, claimed it is "very unlikely" that the U.S. is nearing that milestone.
"Approximately 60% of the population need to get infected or vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity," he said. "As of [last week], less than 10% of the population have tested positive. Certainly a lot of infections went undiscovered, but it seems very unlikely that 7-fold more people were infected than what we know."
Divining the true number of infections in the U.S. has been a contentious question over the past year. Then-CDC Director Robert Redfield in June of last year claimed that, based on serological evidence, infection rates were actually 10 times higher than positive case numbers.
Amazing that AFTER the obvious peak, new President Biden was still telling us this:
Post election, Biden says "Nothing will change the trajectory of covid over the next several months"
22 responses |
Started by TimNew - Jan. 23, 2021, 2:37 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/64687/
This was well seen at the time when Biden made his ludicrous statements.
This was my detailed explanation for cutworm, 5 weeks after we told you here that the peak was happening:
By metmike - Feb. 27, 2021, 8:56 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/63690/#66094
Cutworm,
The dry air started hitting seasonally like it always does in September as temperatures dropped.
This is always a gradual process but always happens every year as the sun gets lower in the sky and weaker.
We have a Winter flu season every year too that coincides with this and the gradually drier air is always a factor.
There are other factors of course but many studies have in the past shown flu outbreaks occurring a couple of weeks after widespread arctic air outbreaks.
Knowing this I am going to speculate on our Winter COVID season this year, dialing in other affects.
Numbers were soaring higher last fall, thru December but the number of people getting vaccinated, added to the number of people who have tested positive for COVID we’re getting pretty high too.
Not to be ignored is the fact that many, many people have been exposed to COVID and even had COVID but were asymptomatic and were never tested.
Some think it’s more than several times the positive tests.
If you look at what happened so suddenly in early January, it sure looks like we suddenly hit some sort of herd immunity from the como of rapid vaccinations and people that had COVID.
Like somebody flipped a switch, COVID numbers plunged straight down for 6 straight weeks, without a pause. A drop of 70% in a short period of time. Early in that period, new President Biden was telling us COVID was going higher and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Other so called experts were ignoring the clear top, weeks after it happened. Still telling us to wear the almost worthless cloth masks....even today......which had ZERO to do with the peak. We’ve had a cloth mask mandate here since early July and they did nothing.
So it appears that herd immunity kicked in around 7 weeks ago with weather conditions also less favorable , being extremely mild across much of the country during January.
But the weather turned sharply colder in early February and that much drier air is more favorable for COVID survival times and transmission.
This usually takes a couple of weeks to show up in Data that measures virus numbers.
If herd immunity has been putting strong downward pressure on transmission, the more favorable very dry weather may only be able to stall the drop or cause just a temporary small increase for a few weeks or so.
metmike: Either I'm the smartest man on the planet (-: orrrrr we need scientists and politicians that can recognize and TELL US THE TRUTH!
problem is politicians are expected to lie while scientists are supposed to be objective and follow the facts. I will guess most Americans have learned after watching Fauci over the last year that what we thought just ain't true.
January 24th post:
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/64687/#64708
Key Points
metmike: What the heck is he talking about??????? Here are the graphs and my comment below. We peaked when Trump was still in office, around 11 days ago. Is he on another planet or is he posturing so that he can tell us in a couple of months, how he saved us.......... his policies and team stopped the higher trajectory??? That's the only thing that makes sense to predict that numbers will suddenly turn back up and get worse for months.
Latest COVID data January 24, 2021-We may have peaked!!
10 responses |
Started by metmike - Jan. 3, 2021, 7 p.m.
Over 25,000,000 people having had COVID and over 7% of the US population. This is as good as being vaccinated for them. Latest data is below. Numbers likely have peaked!! New daily cases have dropped from 260,000/day to under 200,000/day in the last 11 days. Deaths and hospitalizations also falling.
Find this data here: https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en
metmike: I'm NOT the smartest man on the planet. We do need scientists and politicians that can recognize and TELL US THE TRUTH!
They continue to deceive us on the almost worthless cloth masks and instead of telling us the truth...........which is that only N95 masks work.
Get N95 masks ASAP! Here's the truth.
28 responses |
Started by metmike - Dec. 21, 2020, 7:27 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/63115/
The insanely absurd claims that thousands of people, smashed together, often shouting, many wearing almost worthless cloth masks did not spread COVID, the most contagious disease we know of during a pandemic defies common sense/rationality.
Covering up massive COVID being spread from protests-8/8 update below
29 responses |
Started by metmike - July 30, 2020, 7:28 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/57070/
Huge problem with the vaccine....people refusing the vaccine
11 responses |
Started by metmike - Jan. 2, 2021, 12:05 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/63634/
Safety of vaccines:
Vaccines, how do they work/why are people skeptical?
Started by metmike - Dec. 20, 2020, 11:55 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/63066/
The truth is, scientists just don't know.
"Three options: One is that it's gone because of the way people behaved, so we need to continue that behavior. Or it's gone because it's gone and it's never going to come back — great!" says Das, from Georgetown. "Or it's gone, but we don't know why it's gone — and it may come back."
That last option is what keeps scientists and public health experts up at night.
So for now, Indians are kind of holding their breath — just doing what they're doing — until they get vaccinated.
metmike:
It couldn't have been from wearing cloth masks, there is no legit evidence that indicates that places with long lived cloth mask mandates did much better than those without them.
It couldn't have been from being vaccinated because it happened before they were vaccinated.
It could have been because of herd immunity. There were likely many, many more people infected that were asymptomatic and never got tested that got immunity.
If that was the case, and the same thing happened in the US in early January, then closing everything down for almost a year only delayed us from acquiring herd immunity that was inevitable and needed to defeat the virus.
However, there were times when rates were so high that we pushed the limits of our medical health care system to the brink of managing the crisis in some communities and we HAD TO flatten the curve then by shutting down and slowing the herd immunity process down substantially..........to a manageable pace.
At other times and many places, when rates are very manageable and right now, when they are crashing lower, we are doing far more damage with the attempted cure than what the petering out disease is causing.
There is obviously great fear that opening up is going to cause COVID to surge higher again.
Fear is an emotion. The science and truth, which some people claim to be using......but they ignore and instead use politics and falsely CALL IT, science is shouting loudly that we should be rapidly opening up.
Cautiously opening up but using the objective, authentic, science based on the empirical data and facts to.......... OPEN UP.