San Juan Basin Public Health (SJBPH) is reporting a significant increase in COVID-19 cases for both Archuleta and La Plata counties over the past three weeks. Since the start of October, SJBPH has reported an increase of over 72 cases in residents from both counties, with 63 of these cases from La Plata County, and 9 from Archuleta County. The increase is being attributed to workplace outbreaks, social gatherings, and household transmissions…
— from an October 21 press release from San Juan Basin Public Health
The latest news about COVID, here in America, is not especially encouraging.
A recent report on ‘excess mortality’ from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave an analysis of how many deaths we’ve seen in the US this year, compared to what would typically be expected, and calculated that at least 80,000 people died from COVID without being diagnosed with the disease, or else died of other causes because they were unwilling or unable to seek medical care during the outbreak. You can download the report here.
Adding that number to the 219,000 officially-diagnosed COVID fatalities in the US, we get a number closer to 300,000 deaths. The CDC reported that people age 25 to 44 were particularly hit hard, with an ‘excess mortality’ rate more than 25% higher, compared to the expected number of deaths in that age group.
From yesterday’s Washington Post:
“The number of people dying from this pandemic is higher than we think,” said Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has conducted similar studies on excess fatalities. He told The Washington Post that the United States will likely suffer at least 400,000 excess deaths by the year’s end.
But ‘deaths’ might be the easy calculation. We still have no estimate at all for the number of Americans who have survived COVID, but whose health might have been permanently compromised.
Some European countries that reportedly managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic’s first assault are lately reporting sky-high infection rates. The Czech Republic, for example, recorded only 12,000 infections among its 10 million citizens in early July… when thousands gathered on a bridge in Prague to throw the coronavirus a “farewell” party. Now the country is recording thousands of new infections every day… and neighboring Poland plans to convert a national stadium into a field hospital.
The US isn’t doing much better, at the moment.
San Juan Basin Public Health (SJBPH) is reporting “a significant increase in COVID-19 cases for both Archuleta and La Plata counties,” with La Plata County doing relatively worse. La Plata, which includes the city of Durango, has a population of about 56,000 — approximately four times the population of Archuleta County — posted 63 new cases so far during October, according to SJBPH, while Archuleta County had 9 new cases. That puts La Plata’s count — per capita — at almost double the Archuleta rate.
That’s the local picture. Here’s a quick glimpse at the global picture.
According to the World Health Organization, the US as a whole (population 330 million) saw 60,000 new cases reported in the past 24 hours.
India (population 1.3 billion) reported 55,000 new cases, over the past 24 hours.
China (population 1.4 billion) reported 23 cases, over the past 24 hours.
Sweden (population 10 million) reported 0 new cases.
We might think about those numbers in terms of “herd immunity”, which is a statistical theory originally suggested by a researcher named A.W. Hedrich in 1923. Hedrich was analyzing the spread of measles in the US city of Baltimore, and noticed that, after a certain number of children had become immune to measles — by recovering from an infection — the number of new infections temporarily decreased, including among non-immune children.
In the 1960s, the US instituted a mass vaccination program aimed at eradicating measles, and the term “herd immunity” was revived to promote mass vaccination. That led scientists and statisticians, in the 1970s, to develop theories about the “herd immunity threshold” of various diseases, based on their assumed ‘rate of spread’. But the initial theories were overly simplistic, and assumed that every person is equally likely to contract a contagious disease. Further research has shown that person’s with weak immune systems are much more likely to become infected — and more likely to become serious ill — when a contagious disease is making its rounds.
None of the countries I mentioned above — the US, India, China, Sweden — are claiming to have successfully developed a level of “herd immunity”. Nevertheless, the numbers of new infections reflect what appear to be very different situations in these countries.
We are hearing quite a bit of discussion in the media, lately, about “herd immunity” as it relates to the current COVID pandemic, and we’re being told that certain populations — “at risk” populations — are particularly likely to die from a COVID infection. Some public health experts have suggested that, if and when an effective COVID vaccine is developed, the first folks to receive the vaccine ought to be exactly those who are most at risk of serious complications.
Many people are staying home as much as possible, hoping that a vaccine will come along in the near future, and put a quick end to the COVID pandemic.
How likely is that?
And how likely is it that a new vaccine, if rushed into service without proper testing, would negatively affect the very same people who are most “at risk”?