Apr 7 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Overall, the news is positive. We've had our third consecutive day of growth in new cases of around 9%, and that's really significant.

But, I am starting to see signs of areas which aren't doing as well at slowing the growth of new infections, one of which is here in my hometown of Houston.

I've been asked to do my thought of the day earlier in the post. I won't do that, but I will tease the thought of the day, and that is:

No, no! The herd, not the bird!

Here's a quick look at the list of states:

• A few states in the upper portion of the chart pop out at me as growing faster than they "should": Rhode Island, Delaware, and Georgia.
• At the bottom of the chart, Texas, while still low, has been creeping its way up. After floating around 47th-49th place on the state list for the entire time I've been doing the chart, they hit 46th Monday, and 44th Tuesday. Texas has long been pointed to as a potential next hotspot.

Looking in on the counties:

• After hearing a (3-week old) podcast from one of my favorites (Mike Pesca's The Gist) where Pesca mentioned that Kansas and Missouri offered an opportunity to compare similar states where a Democratic governor (Kansas) has in general been more active in stopping the spread of coronavirus than a Republican governor has been (Missouri), I have added some Kansas City-area counties along with St. Louis.
• Harris county grew 30% Monday and almost 20% yesterday, causing it to move from being one of the lowest urban counties in Texas, to being close to the highest.

Here's our list of areas suffering the highest rates of infection:

1. Sun Valley, ID.
2. New York-White Plains-Jersey City.
3. New Orleans.
4. Long Island.
5. Albany, GA.
6. Vail, CO.
7. Park City, UT.
8. Newark, NJ.
9. Poughkeepsie, NY.
10. Crested Butte, CO.
11. Bridgeport, CT.
12. Boston.
13. Shreveport, LA.
14. Detroit.
15. Philadelphia.
16. Indianapolis.
17. Aspen, CO.
18. New Haven, CT.
19. Jackson Hole, WY.
20. Miami, FL

Seattle is now down to around 24th.

Thought of the Day

I've been hearing this movement in conservative circles, that we should be foregoing social distancing and instead just let people get sick (ideally the youngest people who will suffer the least harm), and eventually enough people will have it that our communities will develop herd immunity.

There are some valid ideas here, but there is also an enormous amount of risk in this approach. First is the fact that we have very little idea what level of immunity we'd need in order to get to a point of herd immunity: I've seen studies as low as 30% and as high as 75%. This uncertainty is due in part to the fact that we don't really know just how contagious Covid-19 is (another failure of the lack of testing). But the real problem I see in many arguments in favor of just letting things go until we develop herd immunity is that they don't realize we are already trying to develop herd immunity (whether through infection or inoculation), and we are doing social distancing to reduce the number of deaths prior to that point.

A best-case scenario of 30% immunity needed for the herd effect still requires about 100 million Americans to be infected. How many of those will then die? We don't know for certain the true case fatality rate (CFR), but at a very low estimate of 0.5% you're still talking about 500,000 deaths. But what if the disease spreads too quickly, and your CFR rises due to the hospitals being overwhelmed beyond their capacity to provide critical care? Well, we've seen that situation already: We've seen in it Wuhan, Italy, Spain, France, New York, New Orleans, Detroit.... If your CFR rises five-fold, now we're talking about 2.5 million deaths.

Remember, this is best case scenario. If the actual level needed for herd immunity is 60% of the population, the story is worse.

I don't know about the herd....