A Serious Question About COVID

Very serious question here.

Given that:

(a) We are all probably going to get Covid anyway (see this link)

(b) The vaccines are so effective that they make a case of Covid (especially omicron) much like just having a cold;

(c) Those who are old enough to get this free vaccine, but have decided not to, are very obstinate in not facing facts, and are unlikely to be persuaded otherwise;

(d) Very young kids (none of whom can be vaccinated yet) who get Covid (particularly Omicron) have exceedingly low rates of hospitalizations and deaths (see this link)

THEN,

Why don’t we who ARE vaccinated just remove all of our masks **NOW** and go about our business as usual?

In fact, why don’t we have Covid parties so we can get it all over with?

Colds aren’t fun, but they seldom kill.

And then the unvaccinated adult fools can simply *go to hell* when they catch it, get seriously sick, and die.

Your thoughts?

COVID-19 Numbers in the US do not seem to be growing exponentially

Looking at the past month of CDC-reported infections and deaths from the new corona virus, I conclude that there has been some good news: the total number of infections and deaths are no longer following an exponential growth curve.

The numbers are indeed growing, by either a quadratic (that is, x^2) or a quartic (x^4) curve, which is not good, and there is no sign of numbers decreasing.

BUT it looks as though the physical-social distancing and self-quarantining that I see going on around me is actually having an effect.

Yippee!

Here is my evidence: the actual numbers of infected people are in blue, and the best-fit exponential-growth equation is in red. You can see that they do not match well at all. 

If they did match, and if this were in fact exponential growth, we would have just about the entire US population infected by the end of just this month of April – over 300 million! That no longer seems likely. Take a look at the next graph instead, which uses the same data, but polynomial growth:

Just by eyeballing this, you can see that the red dots and blue dots match really, really well. When I extend the graph until the end of April, I get a predicted number of ‘only’ 1.5 million infected. Not good, but a whole lot better than the entire US population!

Also, let’s look at total cumulative reported deaths so far. Here are the CDC-reported numbers plotted against a best-fit exponential curve:

Up until just a few days ago, this graph was conforming pretty well to exponential growth. However, since about April 8, that seems to be no longer the case. If the total numbers of deaths were in fact growing at the same percentage rate each day, which is the definition of exponential growth, then by the end of April we would have 1.5 million DEAD. That’s THIS MONTH. Continued exponential growth would have 1.2 BILLION dead in this country alone by the end of May.

Fortunately, that is of course impossible.

Unfortunately all that means is that the virus would run out of people to infect and kill, and we would get logistic growth (which is the very last graph, at the bottom).

This fourth-degree mathematical model seems to me to work much better at describing the numbers of deaths so far, and has a fairly good chance of predicting what may be coming up in the near future. It’s still not a good situation, but it shows to me that the social and physical distancing we are doing is having a positive effect.

But let’s not get complacent: if this model correctly predicts the next month or two, then by the end of April, we would have about 60 thousand dead, and by the end of May we would have 180 thousand dead.

But both of those grim numbers are much, much lower than we would have if we were not doing this self-isolation, and if the numbers continued to grow exponentially.

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FYI, a logistic curve is shown below. Bacteria or fungi growing in a broth will grow exponentially at first, but after a while, they not only run out of fresh broth to eat, but they also start fouling their own environment with their own wastes. WE DO NOT WANT THIS SITUATION TO HAPPEN WITH US, NAMELY, THAT WE ALL GET INFECTED!!!