Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

Cases are up. Hospitalizations are up. Deaths were falling but have levelled off. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_s... Scroll down to the map and see how much of the country has "high" rates of community transmission, meaning more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population in the last week.

If your news sources are not telling you about it, I recommend Violet Blue's Patreon (free), where she posts a roundup of covid news every Thursday. https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-65708396 It's detailed enough to feel informative, and infrequent enough that I don't feel like I'm drowning in bad news all week.

Re: Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

#5

Post by amznbyebyebye » Mon, May 02, 2022, 4:54 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #4

Cases are up. Hospitalizations are up. Deaths were falling but have levelled off. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_s... Scroll down to the map and see how much of the country has "high" rates of community transmission, meaning more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population in the last week. If your news sources are not telling you about it, I recommend Violet Blue's Patreon (free), where she…

Wow great suggestion, thanks! Frankly I’m glad my news sources have stopped reporting on it so frequently… or I have just become immune. :)

Re: Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

#6

Post by phs318u » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

Hate to be that guy, but can such articles be unambiguously titled e.g. "Is the US in a silent Covid wave?" The question is still interesting. The assumption that all HN readership is US based isn't.

Re: Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

#7

Post by mpnex » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

I think it's a lot more localized. I read in the Violet Blue link posted elsewhere in thread that the "Bay Area was in a 5th wave" with "numbers higher than the Delta wave from summer 2021" and I couldn't reconcile that with the state-level numbers I had been seeing elsewhere... but then I drilled down into the county-level numbers and sure enough, for SF, Santa Clara, and Alameda, it's back up to August 2021 levels.

But if you look at the data for CA overall, you see a very different picture: yes, things are up, but they're at about 30% of last August. So the bay area trend gets lost in that.

Also, at-home tests are plentiful now, so I'm guessing that a large number of cases are not getting caught up in the reporting system.

Re: Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

#8

Post by unmole » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:29 AM UTC

It's almost a given that everyone on the planet will eventually catch Covid. Despite being fully vaccinated and being isolated for the most part, my entire family caught it in the Omicron surge. From what I can tell, hospitalisations and deaths are significantly lower compared to earlier the waves.

This is what living with Covid looks like. A small portion of the population will have at any given time but it won't be overly disruptive.

Re: Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

#9

Post by mikewarot » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:37 AM UTC

The public health system has been stood down, for political reasons.

The crisis isn't over... many of us suffered a fate worse than death, long covid. I'm one of a huge number of effectively disabled people yanked out of contributing to society in a fully productive manner. The estimates for how many of us there are vary wildly, but we're definitely a cost that hasn't been considered.

In the future, I suspect they'll look back and wonder how we missed the long term implications of this. The closest analogy of this disease is when the explorers from Europe brought a novel disease to the American continent. They weren't all wiped out in a year or two... it took decades. I fear we're in for a long term decrease in life expectancy as a result of the folly of setting the wrong goals in the initial response.

Re: Ask HN: Is the USA in a silent Covid wave?

#10

Post by amznbyebyebye » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #9

The public health system has been stood down, for political reasons. The crisis isn't over... many of us suffered a fate worse than death, long covid. I'm one of a huge number of effectively disabled people yanked out of contributing to society in a fully productive manner. The estimates for how many of us there are vary wildly, but we're definitely a cost that hasn't been considered. In the future, I suspect they'll…

What could have been done differently ? What should we do diffidently going forward ?