Coronavirus, Mid October Edition, 2022
Forgive me father, for I have sinned:
My latest missive is a couple weeks late due to a lack of new things to put into it.
And that is a good thing.
The Numbers:
Nationwide,
the estimated number of cases, using official numbers, has continued to
drop dramatically. From 528,000 on Sept 12 to 348,000 on Oct 12. The
official numbers continue be
under-counted by a factor of 3-10, depending on the source of the
estimate.
More
in keeping with reality, the number of people hospitalized with Covid for this wave has also dropped from 29,000 to 22,300 in the same time period.
To give an idea of the extremes of of the under-count, a recent survey of 3,700 New Yorkers, if extrapolated to the entirety of the US, would have the number of currently active cases at 42 million. A patently absurd number setting the undercount at times 90.
Dominant Variant in the US:
BA.5 79.2% Declined 4% since mid Sept.
BA.4's 14.4% Up 3% since mid Sept.
BF.7's 4.6% Up from under 1% mid Sept
Per CDC tracker...
BF.7?
The latest variant of Covid gaining some traction is BF.7. From under 1% to 4.6 in a month. It is still an Omicron variant, but has a spike protein that evades an antibody drug given to immunocompromised people.
New York Times Interactive Map
This may be behind a pay wall, but worth noting. The New York Times has an interactive web page that has all kinds of good information on the current state of Covid. One is a map of the US, with granularity down to every county in the country. You can select "Hot Spots", Hospitalized, Vaccination Rates, Cases per capita and deaths per capita. It can be found here...
