The curve continues to be flattened—along the wrong axis

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The last time I did this, 9 days ago, I remarked on a peak of one day with 13,099 new cases. I think the cases have been redistributed so the peak is 7440. Not that I have to worry about that being right – the peaks since then have been 17,081 and 20,394 new cases in a day. Yikes! This is more than double the peak of last April. I think the deaths per day is declining, though it is too soon to be sure. In the last week of December the number of deaths per day has been in the 59-76 range. One reason why it is too soon to be sure is I found there is a chunk of data I hadn’t realized was there. Once my data from the state is sorted there are records for some counties at the end that have no date. Up to now this data was just a bit of noise at the edge of the chart. Not this time. This data set shows 1156 deaths that have not yet been assigned a date. Again: Yikes! I revised my graphing program to account for the undated data (I chose to not include it in the graph, trusting it would be next week or so). While I did that I adjusted the Y axis of the chart to draw lines every 1000 cases instead of every 500. And I added the display of the new year. I also ran another program that draws Michigan case distribution maps. In November the hotspot was Keweenaw County in the northern tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. No other county was close. The hotspot in December was Detroit, followed by the counties around it – Macomb, then Wayne, Oakland, and Genesee counties. In my personal COVID journey what I’m experiencing is like a cold – sore throat and drippy nose. This should not be taken to mean in general the omicron variant is no worse than a cold. I wasn’t told I have the omicron variant, though since it is now at least 95% of all new cases I’m pretty sure I do. Yesterday I wrote that I had sent a message to my health system the day before asking for a referral to get a COVID test. That referral didn’t come by the time I got a test. It came today, though I wasn’t expecting messages from my doctor’s nurse on a Saturday. I replied I had a test, that it was positive, and what should I do now? I got a response saying I should do the usual things for the sore throat and drippy nose of a cold. I asked what to do if I became worse. I haven’t gotten a reply to that one yet. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos gave another update on the news of the COVID pandemic. In a chart of the number of COVID cases in the country with a sharp rise at the right edge Sumner wrote “the curve of U.S. daily cases continues to be flattened —along the wrong axis.” On the severity of the omicron variant, he wrote what I need to hear:

One study found that the risk of having to go to the ER with an omicron infection was about 5%, down from about 15% for those infected by delta. However, 5% is still quite a high number, and even that two-thirds drop isn’t enough to relieve the overload brought on by rising cases. In terms of ending up in the ICU, omicron seems to be about half as dangerous as delta, with 0.4% being sent to the ICU at the end of December as opposed to 0.8% in the middle of the delta surge. The odds of ending up on a ventilator were cut by 75% when compared to earlier variants. That all sounds somewhat reassuring. Except that still makes omicron many times more dangerous than the flu, even when a patient is getting good treatment. As hospitals flood with new patients, the chances of getting good treatment swiftly decline—100% of patients who need ventilation die when ventilation isn’t available.

On a personal level, meaning just me, having a 5% chance of going to the ER and a 0.4% chance of being in the ICU sounds like pretty good odds. But what goes on around the country is more than just me and there 5% is a big number. Timothy Faust continues with that idea.

one thing covid reveals is that none of us know how to process large numbers. if everyone gets covid and 0.5% of people die from it (half of what we've seen so far) that's 1.7 million people. poof, goodbye Philadelphia. our brains just can't handle it

Conservatives like to say that only 1% will die of COVID. But that’s a big number – 1% of 330 million is 3.3 million. Kurt Pankau has a degree in math and knows big numbers are incomprehensible. So he tweeted an idea of what is meant by a million new COVID cases reported in the US yesterday (meaning Jan. 4, as he wrote this on Jan. 5)

There are 86400 seconds in a day. For a million people to be diagnosed yesterday, that means that roughly 12 people in this country were diagnosed every second. Yesterday. ... There are just shy of 330 million of us in this country. That means that 1 out of every 330 people got diagnosed YESTERDAY. That's 3/10's of a percent, for those playing along at home, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it really is. ... That's the entire state of Delaware. The entire state of Delaware got diagnosed YESTERDAY! ... If you filled Dodger Stadium to its maximum seating capacity, it would take almost 18 of them to hold the number of people who got diagnosed YESTERDAY

He ended with a photo of the crowd at Obama’s second inauguration. That’s how many were diagnosed yesterday. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on the speech Biden gave on the 1st anniversary of the Capitol attack. This is the first time a sitting president has so thoroughly criticized his predecessor. He attacked the Big Lie, reminding the nasty guy’s base there has never been any evidence. Biden also mentioned Republicans are happy with every aspect of the election – except for the race at the top of the ballot. It was the same ballot on the same day with the same voters. Biden also said the attackers were not tourist or peaceful protests. They are not patriots. One can’t love their country only when they win. The real patriots were the voters, the election workers, and the defenders in the Capitol. He closed by saying he “will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.” In a second post Eleveld included clips of the actual speech. I didn’t watch the speech, I only read Eleveld’s reporting of it. My reaction was summed up rather well in another post by Eleveld that reported voting rights advocates weren’t all that impressed with that last pledge. Even White House aides said the speech doesn’t necessary mean a change in posture. These advocates want to hear concrete plans for passing voting rights protections. So far Biden has been way too noncommittal. He hasn’t shown the urgency of the need to protect our vote. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, had an interesting quote from the Wall Street Journal:

To move beyond Jan. 6, 2021, we must put country ahead of party. For Democrats, that means resisting their leadership’s petty habit of aggravating partisan fault lines by indiscriminately condemning all who came to Washington that day. [Many stayed at the Mall, protected speech]. We Republicans have a heavier burden. I’ve been a Republican my entire life, and believe in what the Republican Party, at its best, has represented for decades. There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy. Love of country demands nothing less. That’s true patriotism.

This quote is of interest because it is from Karl Rove, a very destructive crony of Bush II who was another guy who wanted to be a monarch, but at least had the decency to leave at the end of his term. Dworkin also included a quote from The Hoarse Whisperer who tweeted:

Yes, I know how terrible Karl Rove is… however, I didn’t see an op-ed like this coming and it certainly doesn’t hurt our efforts. We NEED there to be at least a schism between the Josh Hawleys and Goehmerts and Boeberts and other Rs.

Duke Kwon is a pastor whose Twitter bio includes, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” He tackles the claim that “Jan. 6 Had Nothing to Do With Christianity” by posting a thread of 19 images proving his point. The great actor Sidney Poitier died a couple days ago at the age of 94. I think I’ve seen only two of his movies – Lilies of the Field and To Sir, With Love. I was too young for the subject matter for most of the rest. I probably saw a movie or two he directed, though I doubt I knew he was the director. I knew he was the first black person to win an Oscar for Best Actor (Hattie McDaniel had won for Best Supporting Actor back when Gone With the Wind came out). He did that in 1963. The next black actors to win Best Actor were Denzel Washington and Halle Berry in 2001. Of course, the tributes have been pouring in. Bob Mondello, movie critic for NPR, talked about the string of movies from 1958 to 1967 that starred Poitier. His name was soon above the title. Mondello talked about how Poitier navigated the racial divide. Rebekah Sager of Kos talked about how his roles reflected his work towards equality and justice. This post includes a few of the most famous clips. One is In the Heat of the Night in which a white man slaps him and he slaps right back. Quite daring for 1967. Here is a video of his segment in the Kennedy Center Honors tributes in 1995. Why write about him if I barely know his work? Because it is good to hear how groundbreaking and unusual his work in the 1960s was and how important it was for all the black actors since then. Three generations of black actors have succeeded because he blazed the trail. As one voice in the KC Honors said in the 1960s he was alone. Now we see he was the beginning.