The pandemic has become predictable, which is the world we much prefer to live in. Cases and deaths continue their slow but steady declines, vaccine approvals for boosters and children continue to slowly move forward. Mandates continue to make people angry but mostly work when used, while also not that often being used. Same old, same old.

The big news story was that one of the studies of Long Covid was revealed to be vastly overestimating frequency due to a methodological ‘error.’ It’s an important update.

Executive Summary

Cases and deaths declining as expected.
Approvals progressing slowly as expected.
Long Covid study had important error, see discussion later in post.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 560k cases (-10%) and 11,500 deaths (-8%).

Results: 547k cases (-12%) and 11,051 deaths (-12%).

Prediction for next week: 481k cases (-12%) and 9,835 deaths (-11%).

We are still in a low-variance situation, with no reason to expect any big surprises for at least several more weeks.

Deaths

The exact rate of decline here was a pleasant surprise, but we’ve gotten to the point where this is a lagging indicator, so the times when it is surprising are mostly about data gathering issues, either holidays or changes in the ways in which we do testing. Expect this trend to continue, and continue to mirror cases with a lag.

Cases

This is pretty much exactly what we would have expected. The Northeast number is slightly disappointing, others were slightly better than expected, but no real surprises.

Vaccinations

The rate of vaccinations continues to not change much, and it’s clear that the positive bump wasn’t the start of a surge. That continues not to tell us much about how much work the mandates are doing here. My impression is that the mandates that have teeth work, but that few of them have teeth.

In his podcast interview this week with FiveThirtyEight, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb asks where the cost-benefit analyses are on the vaccine mandates, since there don’t seem to be any. He estimates that we could use mandates to go from something like 80% adult vaccination rates to 84%, and asks how much that really accomplishes.

My answer is that this change would be worth quite a lot, but how much depends heavily on how we would react to the two scenarios.

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