About the Fat Lady

It seems that even intelligent pols in Blue states are bending to the nutballs in the asylum, who assert that the opera is over. Fact, the fat lady ain't near on stage to sing. Some specifics.

- deaths continue apace

more people are dying of the coronavirus now than during most points of the pandemic.

If you look up the NYT graph page you can clearly see that deaths remain in the general area of the Covid-δ peak from last October.

- yet another prediction. The CNN Covid page, as I type, lists 942,985 deaths so far. That puts us 57,015 occupied body bags from 1,000,000. There are lots of Named Numbers in science, Avogadro's being the most well known, at least by name. I doubt more than a few carry the number itself in close memory (it's 6.02214076×10²³ mol^-1, and yes, I had to look it up). So, I offer that 1,000,000 Covid deaths be the DeSantis Number, in honor of that cretin. If you cursor vewy, vewy carefully along the deaths graph, you can rest on the 23 February numbers. They are:

7-day 1,908
daily 3,025

What?? You mean deaths are going up?? Well, at least today. Since the 7-day peak (2,642) on 3 February, the number has bounced between 3,000-ish and 1,000-ish. It's reasonable to expect to have the 7-day to start back up in the near future. So, how many days to the DeSantis Number? Let's split the difference on 2,500/day. Simple division says 23 days, so around the last week of March.

- as mentioned before, the jury is still out on the contagion/virulence balance of BA.2/Covid-π. The CDC page shows little about BA.2/Covid-π moving up over Covid-ο. Looking elsewhere (the CDC data lags a bit), and generally doesn't offer predictions.

BA.2 has now been found from coast to coast and accounts for an estimated 3.9% all new infections nationally, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It appears to be doubling fast.

"If it doubles again to 8%, that means we're into the exponential growth phase and we may be staring at another wave of COVID-19 coming in the U.S.," says Samuel Scarpino, the manager director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation.
[my emphasis]

If that happens, and I'm a believer in numbers, some dumb pols are in for a rude awakening.

Ain't no fat lady sung yet.