Hindsight and foresight

 On September 1st this year, I posted a short essay entitled "What're the odds you know (or knew) someone?"   It posited that there might indeed be some ratio of Confirmed Cases in any locale that might help people begin to address the reality that Covid is indeed a pandemic of serious consequence, and not a Trumpian or 'fake news' hoax.   I put that number at somewhere between 1 out of 20 to 1 out of 30 in your community, because at that number, you likely will know a specific person by name who has it.

I wrote this two weeks after the end of the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota, as Trump was hosting election rallies in the upper Midwest.   We didn't at that time 'know' what the Sturgis impact might be.   And at that time, only 61 counties, a mere 2% of the USA, had more than 5,000 cases per capita (5,000/100,000 = 1 in 20).    

And Trump had not himself become infected as yet.

So here we are, nine weeks later, nearing the end of a hotly contested Presidential election, in a week that for the first time, has back-to-back 100,000+ new Confirmed Cases daily.  

What are the current "Do you know someone?" ratios?   Well, take a look at this table:

So, two months ago, fewer than 2% of America's counties had 1 person in 20 infected.   Today, that number is 12% of counties, or 1 out of 8, versus 1 out of 50.    Maybe more significantly, today 40% of US counties have at least one person in 30 who has been Confirmed Infected, vs. only 8% 2 months ago

At that point two months ago, 20 states had NO counties with that many cases; today only 7 states can claim the same 'it's not happening here'      

One big change, and it is an important one--the average age of Confirmed Cases continues to decline, dipping now more than ever into children and young adults, and the younger workforce who have all basically been urged to 'go back to work or school'.    The reason for this, of course, is that deaths are very disproportionately happening to older victims, so as the pool of young cases rises in percentage, naturally the death rate for the entire populace declines.   In addition, treatments are getting better, and hopefully we'll see some effective vaccines in the not-too-distant future.   

We'll cover more detail on these aspects in a future post.