Posted by Things have been kind of plugging along in recent days. Infections are flat – not down and not up. Averages over the past few weeks are still going down, but this is more of an artifact of infections being higher 2-3 weeks ago, not that the data continues to trend down.
Here’s the 3-week trend. It’s basically flat. Notice that the 3 lowest days are all more than a week ago.
The 5th order polynomial model is standing firm stating that infection numbers are going to increase. It remains the most powerful model. And actually lines up well with the return of cooler weather and cold and flu season.
Deaths and hospitalizations are virtually zero. From that perspective, the pandemic is over.
Which makes me continue to ask the question, if we were to track other illnesses that went up during certain times of the year, would we call those epidemics? What if we tracked normal colds and they spiked, but virtually none went to the hospital and died? Is that an epidemic? Same question on flu?
What about paper cuts? We have thousands of people inflicted with paper cuts every day. Some even get infected and people go to the hospital. It’s true that some have even died from this. Do we call that an epidemic? Do we shut down schools, businesses, and churches for that?