I also think we are majorly jumping the gun while we ignore seasonality.
all the rules we are currently rolling out are really just the summer/fall 2021 rules. id say it is highly likely that we see another season of high covid numbers (much smaller than peak) in Dec-March of this winter. Then maybe the CBC comes back and says ‘masks back on’.
Just complaining about the short sightedness of society.
I mean, my state is lifting all restrictions June 30. Which I assume means the mask requirement for everybody. By that point, most people will have stopped wearing masks anyway, regardless of vax status.
Even sans COVID, I’m expecting to put the masks back on in flu/cold season, but that’s to see if I can prevent catching a cold.
agreed. Likely masks during flu season will become fairly common for the next 5 years. and maybe during air travel forever.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see another wave in fall/winter.
Good luck with that.
Given the higher proportion of “vaccine hesitancy” among Black & Brown people, for historically understandable reasons, does this cross over into de facto unfair racial discrimination?
Ran to Target yesterday evening. New sign at the door that masking is recommended but not required. I would say the masking percentage was down to 75% for both customers and employees.
I think the relative impact is felt more in the middle class white male sector, where they are going from 0 discrimination to some amount greater than 0 for the first time ever.
While the minority community is going from 1000000 discrimination to 10000001.
Also, I’ve been following this, and the minority community has mostly moved from “afraid of this vaccine thing” to “I am juggling two jobs and don’t have time to deal with vaccination”. This is adding to their burden, but I think that will be short-term, if the states do a decent job of making vaccines easier to get. The people who are still really “vaccine hesitant” are mostly conservative white men.
Sredni,
You’re due for another dose of the C******* vaccine.
Thanks Walgreens for being so secretive. Nobody will ever suspect.
Is there ANY evidence of seasonality? I pretty much only followed numbers in my state, but they increased starting in June last year, kept increasing through January, and then sharply dropped in February and moreso in March. Winter did not end Feb 1. I thought we’d see an increase in April due to Sping Break but we didn’t. And while we’ve have pockets of variants showing up, they are tiny compared to what was happening last August/September.
Just curious – do you live in a cold place where people huddle indoors in dry air in the winter, or a hot place where people huddle indoors in dry air in the summer?
Most respiratory diseases are seasonal, although the mechanics of why aren’t well understood. Odds are this one is too, though.
I’m guessing you’re in California?
I would be interested in seeing evidence of this as well. Seems it’s spiked in hot and cold places around the globe. Very different than the flu
A couple facts that point to seasonality being a big driver:
As a whole, US cases appear to have fairly well followed a weighted average of the seasonal curves proposed by Edgar Hope-Simpson for Northern hemisphere temperate & tropical zones.
As Miss Van Pelt points out, most respiratory viruses follow seasonal patterns, and this one is likely to settle into a seasonal pattern too as it becomes endemic, if that hasn’t happened already.
I’m more south than north, but we did get ice and snow and actual cold temps this winter. (Vs the weather that we call cold and others laugh at.) We had a steady buildup throughout the fall (which IMO is the nicest time to be outdoors). And then a sharp decline in Feb & March. I was seriously worried about our hospitals in December & January.
So anyway we huddle indoors in summer AND winter.
But our growth rate was highest last summer. Then the rate of growth declined but the raw numbers started looking big and scary. Then we hit a sort of secondary peak in the growth rate in November, and it has declined since then. We were horrible at masking and distancing the whole time.
To me it looks less like seasonality and more like the people who were most susceptible either already got sick or got vaccinated in the first round. But there’s no way vaccines alone caused the sharp decline in Feb. I thought it was weather related, that people weren’t getting tested bc it was just too dang cold. But there was never any rebound even with spring break and a few “corrections” when some positive tests were “found” that should have been reported earlier.
So what I’ve noticed in the urban and suburban areas where I live, most people and businesses are voluntarily choosing masks. The local Kroger chain and Target are keeping their mask mandate, even though the corporate policy dropped it. And I went to Trader Joe’s yesterday and everyone was wearing a mask even though they didn’t have to. Costco too. I saw a total of 5 people maskless.
I think we are going through a transition. My guess is you will see fewer masks in a few weeks.
Of course, this one doesn’t need to become endemic. I don’t think the first world has any endemic diseases to which we have a vaccine with a 90+% efficacy.
If we are lucky, and the vaccine is good for several years, and if enough states require it for school, we may actually wipe it out after all. (and we may reduce the incidence of colds, too, as there seems to be some cross-reactivity between the RNA vaccines and the coronaviruses that cause colds.) But sadly, this is likely to become endemic, and old people and immunocompromised people and unlucky people will die from it for the for foreseeable future.