New Covid Metrics

 At last!

Since the early days of the pandemic, I've used Covid Act Now as my primary resource on the state of the pandemic. It used to trace new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It would have immunization levels, ratio of new cases per 100,000 people and so on.

As the pandemic changed, the website remained very conservative in its evaluation of the pandemic. That led to a lot of states being "Orange" or even "Red" because of a single metric being high. If your state had a really good testing regimen in place, it would have more positive tests, but fewer hospitalizations, which made it look worse than it really was.

The new metrics are tied to the fact that this is no longer a "novel" coronavirus. Either via vaccination or infection, a great many Americans have had their immune systems primed to fight off Covid in the future.

The new metrics are all per 100,000 people and look at overall cases, hospital visits, and hospital admissions.

As someone who has been extremely pissed at the cavalier attitude that many have had towards a virus that has killed more than a million Americans and continues to kill thousands every couple of weeks, I also understand that we have simply moved on from Covid restrictions. I no longer mask up, and I don't feel especially vulnerable. (I also don't act like a turd if someone else is wearing a mask.)

As long as no new variants show up, it's time to back off and monitor.