The upswing, week 3

[petrea_mitchell]

It has been damp and gloomy all week, but the daffodils are coming up. There's one along my "commute" walking route that might be blooming by Monday.

Covid-19 cases are dropping fast across the US, except here where they were already low and are just barely ticking down. Our positive test rate is still not far below 5%.

Things are a little better on the vaccination front, where Oregon is about at the national average for percentage of population who have had their first and seconds shots. The supply has stabilized enough that our health authorities have started making predictions about when later groups of people may become eligible. If no further vaccines are approved, the SO can expect to be eligible in April, and I can expect to be in July, which, with a 2-shot vaccine plus time for the immunization to take hold, means almost certainly no travel for me until sometime after Labor Day.

But everyone also expects the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to get emergency approval any minute now, and J&J claims it can get 100 million doses to the US by June (for comparison, about 42 million vaccine doses have been administered in the US so far). Hopefully that speeds up the timeline. It's not just a long time to wait to travel, it's a long time to spend being nervous about encountering someone who's been vaccinated and thinks they can stop taking precautions against being a carrier.

In the shorter term, at least I have a virtual convention to look forward to next weekend. And I'll keep looking for those daffodils.

Comments

[joseph_teller]

I suspect the federal insistence on masks on federal property and public transit nationally is helping. I've been saying for most of the year that the transit system was a a huge vector point from the data I had, and those two changes (and no more Trump rallies all over the country) are helping cut the infection rate.

But.... the new viral variants are coming on strong in some states and may be a long term threat as there are a lot of cases overseas of people that had had the original strain getting the new strain as a reinfection....

And the South African strain is very resistant to some forms of the Vaccines....

[petrea_mitchell]

More masks will definitely help, but it's too soon to see the effect yet, it'll take about a month. What's happening right now is probably just the end of the surge from people getting together in late December.

[delosharriman]

We're still at a thousand new cases a week here in Tarrant County, Texas. It's bizarre seeing the differences in attitude : 50 a week in the whole state of Bavaria is enough for the government there to impose heavy-duty restrictions. Here? People carry on practically as normal, & expect everyone to do so.