Goodbye, Wayne

One of my classmates from high school was buried today. He died of COVID, the first of our class to do so, as far as we know. I didn't go to the funeral, or the memorial.

I did go grocery shopping this afternoon. About half the shoppers and all of the employees were wearing masks, which is a big improvement over the last time I was there. I wanted to grab the unmasked people and say "We buried someone I knew in high school today. He died of COVID. Do you think you're safe? Do you think this is over?" I didn't. Instead I got my groceries and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

COVID deaths in Pennsylvania, as in all of the U.S., continue to climb. This isn't slowing down. This isn't over. Get vaccinated. Wear a mask.

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The Omicron variant continues to make hay of all previous graphs. This variant is allegedly "milder" than previous versions, but can also walk through walls - vaccinations provide very little protection against getting it, but they do minimize its effects, allegedly. Even masks and social distancing seem to offer little protection. The official line is "everybody is going to get Omicron," which means that we've basically entered the "Fuck it, whatever" stage of the pandemic. (And the new catchphrase now is "It's no longer a pandemic, the disease is now endemic," which is a distinction meaningless to most of the people uttering it.) Schools are open, while at the same time many local (and state, and federal) offices are closed. Many people are being ordered to return to the workplace, where it's impossible to avoid being exposed to infected coworkers. These are the same schools and workplaces that closed in March 2020, when COVID cases and deaths were so low they don't even show up on current graphs.

The other view is "Not to worry, if you've been vaccinated and aren't disabled or have other comorbidities, you'll be fine, so everything is OK," which is not at all comforting to those who are disabled, have those comorbidities, are immune compromised, or are unable to get the vaccine for medical reasons. It feels like they're being written off as an acceptable loss.

Sometime soon this graph will be unreadable without a logarithmic y-axis.

The logarithmic version. I first started using this when it looked like cases were going to drop so low that the day-to-day variation would be unreadable. Now new cases are rising so high that the previous variation may soon be unreadable with a linear y-axis, much like the March 2020 data is now.

Far more cases of a less deadly variant have resulted in a fairly steady rate of deaths. It's math.

There was an upturn to the slope from December 2020-March 2021, and a downturn from March 2021-August 2021, but overall this has been a fairly straight line since April 2020. Assuming the dynamics continue as they are, we'll hit one million deaths by June 2022.
But it's not a safe bet that the dynamics will continue as they are.