Only 2% of the population is vaccinated, and Winter was supposed to keep Covid-19 at fever pitch from indoor transmissions. Peoples' behavior hasn't changed much. Did they just mobilize all testing to vaccinations instead?
Holidays are over, the wave from Christmas is finishing. If it keeps going down then I means it was something done with vaccines, but if it just kinda stabilizes next week then it's just us getting over a really bad wave from people going home to kill their grandparents and open presents.
The thing is, the value of R was clearly larger than 1 before the Christmas wave, while now it is lower than one, so something probably did change.
Christmas isn't the only holiday. November and December are always going to be the worst times for transmission of flu.
Yeah, that was the baseline growth, you can see 3 distinct bumps that seem to line up with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas though
But that's the point. If nothing changed compared to before the holidays, then there should still be a baseline growth, but there isn't.
See how it spikes then plateaus? If we reach another plateau, that's bad. If it keeps going down that's good. It seems to stabilize around the previous peak
As I said before, the infection rates of epidemics don't tend to stabilise. Excluding really big short term events, they tend to follow an exponential evolution within the available hosts, according to the R value which is variable and represents how many people each infected person spreads the disease to. If R is above 1, rates increase. If it is below 1, they decrease. Brief events that spread the virus to many people who wouldn't normally go on to spread the virus can give sudden spikes which then fall down again, but otherwise if R falls below 1 for some time, it is probably because something different is happening than before. When it "plateaus" it is because R is very close to 1. It seems like R has actually dropped which either means something changed in the behavior of people compared to before, or something else has changed. So I think for now it is getting better. When the mutations really start picking up then they're gonna rise again but for now it's on a good course.
Didn’t they replace a lot of testing sites with vaccination sites? I feel like that would reduce the number of testing.
I tried to get tested last week and had a way harder time doing so, place I usually went was shutdown and the other place was in vaccine mode. Anecdotally I think you're right.
I have nothing more to add than to say that your handle makes me :panting:
It is either because there was a big wave that's over, or because more people than have been accounted for have gotten covid so it is having a harder time finding new hosts than before, or possibly a combination of these things plus the vaccines (which probably means less spread through hospitals too). I believe it can't JUST be the first one since it seems that the R value was above 1 before Christmas, while it is less than 1 now so something must have changed compared to before either in the behavior of people or measures or available hosts.
OR they are testing less. If that is the case we shouldn't see a decrease in deaths in the following 2 weeks.
I think it's testing bias. The people who were mandatory to test are the same people who were getting the vaccine. Plenty of folks who aren't under mandatory testing rules will get it and just won't get tested. So the numbers to down but people are still getting sick.
I’ve been saying this since month 3 of the pandemic. most people who get sick do not get tested. I know about 20 people who have gotten sick in the past 6 months or so , 3 people got tested.
