We Have To Change Our Metrics

 I'm seeing a lot of things like this tweet, that talk about rising cases in America. You see the same issue on Covid ActNow, which is a reliance on "cases" to talk about spread. As testing is still fairly pervasive, we have a much better idea of who is currently carrying the virus. If you look at the map at the tweet, you can see that Africa has almost no cases. Really? Given how poor their vaccination rates are?

Much more likely is that much of the developing world simply doesn't know who is infected, because they lack the testing infrastructure. However, knowing someone is infected does not determine whether they are sick. My county is currently listed as dark orange or "high" risk. Currently these are the numbers they list at Covid ActNow: Litchfield has about 14 new "cases" per 100,000; our R0 is 1.03; our positive test rate is 3.8% and 77% of residents have at least one dose of the vaccine.

One metric that they DON'T use is hospitalizations, especially ICU. They have it on their website though, and only 29% of ICU beds are filled. Deaths are sporadic. In fact, ActNow rates our vulnerability as Very Low, even as they rate our risk level as High.

That simply doesn't add up.

Covid is not going anywhere. We need to understand that. Andy Slavitt, an epidemiologist whose been a voice of sanity on Twitter (of all places), wants to stress that we are not at the end of this pandemic. Certainly new variants are pretty terrifying, as we saw with Delta. Reasonable precautions should be followed, but "reasonable" varies from person to person.

It seems we are finally moving past the Hot Take Season over Democrat's poor performance in Virginia and New Jersey, though everyone wants to focus on CRT and liberal culture war overreach. If you want to know my theory as to why Democrats suffered and why Biden has low approval ratings? Simple, Covid continues to bedevil our lives - both in terms of schools and the economy. There are still some school districts that are virtual or partly virtual. The disruptions to the economy are real, and people are unhappy. When they are unhappy they take it out on the President's party.

As we move into a world where vaccines and therapeutics greatly reduce the number of Covid deaths, we need to adjust how we deal with Covid. In the US, deaths are falling after the DeSantis Wave of early fall. Not quite to the rate of the giddy months of June and July, but deaths lag cases by several weeks, especially as we get better at treating the disease.

I wear a mask to class; I wear a mask to shop; but I'm not typical in my community. Lots of people in stores are going unmasked. It could very well be that they have Covid and are simply asymptomatic. There are small measures that we should continue to take. I don't really care about wearing a mask, but I very much want this wrestling season to happen. My athletes have missed a season that they will never get back.

We can no longer set policies, though, based on the idea that we have to get to zero infections, but as close to zero deaths as possible. Back in 2020, Trumpist talking points were that Covid was "just like the flu." That was bullshit. But that IS what we need to be willing to accept, and I wonder how we are going to measure that.