Parallax View - part the forty third

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   913
100 to 999 - 1,686

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,119. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

This decline in infections is going about unchallenged, even by the Snowflake teeVee pundits. I do find it unexplained.

Looking at the epidemic curve, Covid cases will peak in January and we will see cases starting to decline in March. -- Scott Gottlieb/12 November 2020

This ain't March. January, especially North of the Mason-Dixon line, is the coldest, most shut-in month. February ain't much better. While a peak was expected, it was expected to be more of a plateau than short-term spike.

As an alternative, though a bit more laborious to interpret, is the CNN map. It gives you two radio buttons, so you can see (per 100,000) total/current and cases/deaths. If you take total cases, the disaster of the Northern Plains is, well, plain. Dewey county, SD has 23,574 cases to date. That's some serious infection. Whether it justifies saying, "Herd Mentality" or not is a question. West Texas is also pretty dark.

The problem that can't be ignored: if the decline is sustained, and none of the mutants gets a vise grip, wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 and his minions will Trump-et

- their claim all along that there really are more cases (well, they actually claimed that case count was exaggerated, but who's counting?) than reported - means that we've already reached Herd Mentality just as wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 said would happen, "It's going to disappear. One day — it's like a miracle — it will disappear." - 27 February 2020

Early on, these missives allowed as how it would be useful to trace the experience with other coronaviruses, to see where Covid-19 would head. Short duration immunity, aka reinfection, and mutation first among equals. So, it seems to be from one of the Novavax trials.

Additionally, 1 in 3 patients was thought to have already had COVID-19, which suggests that reinfection can occur, and that patients who have contracted the original strain of the virus may not be protected against the new variants.