Epidemiology is all about predictions. Osterholm made a bad one. Other people made good predictions.I thought you said epidemiology wasn't about predictions? Should I give this as much credence as Osterholm's Armageddon prediction? He's got about 5 weeks remaining (quote published Jan 31).
“The fact is that the surge that is likely to occur with this new variant from England is going to happen in the next six to 14 weeks. And, if we see that happen, which my 45 years in the trenches tell me we will, we are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country,” Osterholm said.
The other issue is behavior. Even with the UK variant, we should be seeing declining cases. There is no good reason we should have increasing cases and a 30% vaccination rate.
That’s why I predicted that CA would hover at the red/purple boundary. Whenever cases began to get low, we’d open restaurants and our dinners would nudge cases back up. Which we did. The state is currently at 7 daily cases per 100K, and level.
Had we been willing to keep doing what we did in January/February, cases would still be dropping by 50% every 2 weeks. We’d be at about 700 cases per day statewide, and ready to think about how to play whack-a-mole like South Korea.
But, apparently we like restaurants, bars, and gyms more than we hate covid. So covid gets to hang out with us a few months more. Hope the tiramisu was good.