state of the plagues

[mindstalk]

Possibly you haven't heard about covid much recently. Is it over? Nah. Going by wastewater models, as described in the various reports here, 1 in 96 Americans is estimated as infected with covid-19 as of April 8. Different groups estimated 1 in 139 for Canada (wastewater, March 31) and 1 in 143 for UK (surveillance testing, March 14, project discontinued then). And the forecast based on past years is to go up again, before another trough in June-July, and then going back up again a lot.

I used to check various dashboards, which are mostly retired now. But Hawaii's is still active, reporting an average of 14 new cases per day per million people. That's just what's actually tested and reported. A common correction suggestion is 20x, which would be 280 per million, well into my old alarm zone. 10 day infection implies 2800 infections per million, or 1 in 357.

CDC weekly deaths were about 1000 in March; that's about 70/day, or 0.2 per million people. If infection fatality rate (IFR) is 1 in 2000, that would imply 140,000 new cases/day; 10 day infection periods would mean 1 in 235 were infected. If IFR is lower, that implies more cases. I also don't know if the CDC deaths are comprehensive, or if many states are simply not reporting.

Washington state reports 0.3 weekly deaths per 100,000 in early March, or 1.1 daily deaths per million. Which is 5 times the CDC's US rate, implying 1 in 47 actively infected.

I wouldn't take any of these numbers as precise. Everything's based on assumptions, and my simple multiplication models are pretty crude. But as an order of magnitude, they're pretty suggestive: if you interact with people a lot -- eating out frequently or taking public transit or flying or going to church -- the chance that you're exposed to covid infectious people is still high. If you don't hear about covid, it's because people aren't looking or talking, not because it's gone away.

And it's not likely to kill most of us (that low IFR), but the chance of some crippling effect is still alarmingly high for something you can get once every year or two if you don't take precautions.

As for bird flu, I dunno. This article is more comprehensive than most, talking about genetics, and why the probable cow-to-cow transmission going on may not mean it's airborne between mammals (yet). Infections don't seem that bad for cows, but have been devastating for sea mammals.