Meanwhile...COVID is still killing us at record rates
I try not to look at individual days because reporting delays associated with weekends and holidays tend to pile up and skew the data. Seven day trends are better as smoothing the noise in the data but even that falters over a long weekend like the holidays.
So I have been waiting to see if the drop over the holidays was at all real or whether the trend line would bounce back up. As expected, the trend line bounced. As of yesterday, the 7-day average hit its all time high of 2834 and will surely go up further today. And I expect it to keep going up through next week.
So here is a prediction. Just a hunch on pretty close data monitoring and some simple logic
I think the 7-day average for deaths might peak right around Inauguration Day.
Don't get me wrong, the shit will still ravage us for months and people will still die for most of the year. But there will be a peak.
I realize that many will think this is a pollyanna prediction but here is my logic.
- Peak transmission probably happened over the holidays. Travel and get togethers being the biggest offenders.
- New Years Eve was likely smaller as a spreader event than Christmas because many gathering places would have been closed. And people are more cautious of public gatherings than they are of family gatherings
- Illness to death is about a 3-4 week lag
- Slowly but surely the vaccine will affect the death statistics. Most of the deaths are coming from the elderly and vulnerable. Since the most vulnerable people went first so that impact will be disproportional to its actual penetration into the population. So even at 50% effective (ie 1 dose) it can begin to bring down deaths sooner that you might expect.
Just my thoughts.
I think it would be perfect if that threshold happened on 1/20 just as a cosmic acknowledgment that better days were coming. It's got to be better than it has been.
No matter what, I expect that peak to be no more than a few weeks later.
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