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Not to poo-poo this headline, but with a growth curve, your expectation is that every single day will be the worst (until herd-immunity/vaccination). I've seen

Not to poo-poo this headline, but with a growth curve, your expectation is that every single day will be the worst (until herd-immunity/vaccination). I've seen this headline at least 12 different times on youtube. It can be deceptive depending on your local area, as well as just exhausting to hear so many times. For example, if you live in New York, yesterday's death toll was 7% of the highest day its ever been.

thrav 6y ago
Not enough people realize that these waves are almost completely regionally isolated, with a bit of spillover everywhere. Wave 1: NY + NJ (some other northeast) Wave 2: Florida + Texas + Arizona (most of south) Wave 3: Midwest You can even see this within California. Wave 1: Bay Area, Wave 2: Some LA, Wave 3: All SoCal Each wave basically amounts of when that population gave up distancing, and once you’ve undergone your wave, you don’t really get it that bad again. (unless you have a small wave that misses much of the population, like LA) Texas’ wave 3 is popping in different cities than wave 2 (Texas, like Cali, is just huge).
- ghaff 6y ago
  There are a ton of narratives that lump regions together, impute a bunch of political and/or cultural factors, etc. and I suspect that, at the end of the day, we'll look back and a neutral examination will have trouble consistently mapping outcomes to controllable (or at least explainable) factors. What did Belgium do to piss off the COVID-19 gods?
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
We have see again and again that people don't take common sense measures to protect themselves and others until scared by climbing death rates. Once this happens, positivity rated decrease. Then they get COVID fatigue, relax these behaivors and the numbers climb once again.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I love that term: COVID fatigue. We may be tired of COVID, but COVID is not tired of us. Even when the death rates are super scary, people still don't follow common sense measures. Remember the so-called lockdowns in the USA? Everyone was still out horsing around, getting together, buying their khakis, eating at whatever restaurants they could find that were open. There was no enforcement, so nobody followed the rules. What a surprise! Even now, where the disease is arguably worse than it's ever been, local governments are talking about opening up schools and other indoor super-spreader businesses like bars and night clubs. In most places, churches, with their saliva-fest indoor singing and chanting, are fully open. Nobody is taking sane measures at the arguable height of the pandemic! If we learned anything from this pandemic, we learned that we can't rely on people voluntarily acting collectively to make things better for everyone.
delecti 6y ago
It's not a simple growth curve though. Yesterday was the first time we surpassed the daily peak from April. There was a surge in April, then a smaller brief peak in June, then a smaller slower surge in August, and now we're peaking even higher than any of those. Edit: While deaths yesterday are only a little above the deaths from the April peak, cases yesterday are 6 times as high.
jawarner 6y ago
That's a good point the local variation. I think it's significant to note that for a while after the spike in the summer, the U.S. wasn't in a growth curve. A lot of people thought that the worst was behind them. This article shows that the current spike is now worse than the previous spike.
alisonkisk 6y ago
So? The weather also happens every day but it's still news.

thrav 6y ago

Not enough people realize that these waves are almost completely regionally isolated, with a bit of spillover everywhere. Wave 1: NY + NJ (some other northeast) Wave 2: Florida + Texas + Arizona (most of south) Wave 3: Midwest You can even see this within California. Wave 1: Bay Area, Wave 2: Some LA, Wave 3: All SoCal Each wave basically amounts of when that population gave up distancing, and once you’ve undergone your wave, you don’t really get it that bad again. (unless you have a small wave that misses much of the population, like LA) Texas’ wave 3 is popping in different cities than wave 2 (Texas, like Cali, is just huge).

ghaff 6y ago
There are a ton of narratives that lump regions together, impute a bunch of political and/or cultural factors, etc. and I suspect that, at the end of the day, we'll look back and a neutral examination will have trouble consistently mapping outcomes to controllable (or at least explainable) factors. What did Belgium do to piss off the COVID-19 gods?

FlyMoreRockets 6y ago

We have see again and again that people don't take common sense measures to protect themselves and others until scared by climbing death rates. Once this happens, positivity rated decrease. Then they get COVID fatigue, relax these behaivors and the numbers climb once again.

ryandrake 6y ago
I love that term: COVID fatigue. We may be tired of COVID, but COVID is not tired of us. Even when the death rates are super scary, people still don't follow common sense measures. Remember the so-called lockdowns in the USA? Everyone was still out horsing around, getting together, buying their khakis, eating at whatever restaurants they could find that were open. There was no enforcement, so nobody followed the rules. What a surprise! Even now, where the disease is arguably worse than it's ever been, local governments are talking about opening up schools and other indoor super-spreader businesses like bars and night clubs. In most places, churches, with their saliva-fest indoor singing and chanting, are fully open. Nobody is taking sane measures at the arguable height of the pandemic! If we learned anything from this pandemic, we learned that we can't rely on people voluntarily acting collectively to make things better for everyone.

delecti 6y ago

It's not a simple growth curve though. Yesterday was the first time we surpassed the daily peak from April. There was a surge in April, then a smaller brief peak in June, then a smaller slower surge in August, and now we're peaking even higher than any of those. Edit: While deaths yesterday are only a little above the deaths from the April peak, cases yesterday are 6 times as high.

jawarner 6y ago

That's a good point the local variation. I think it's significant to note that for a while after the spike in the summer, the U.S. wasn't in a growth curve. A lot of people thought that the worst was behind them. This article shows that the current spike is now worse than the previous spike.

alisonkisk 6y ago

So? The weather also happens every day but it's still news.