Speaker 1: Welcome everybody, we have not done a COVID update in in weeks now,
we've just sort of been waiting to see what happens with our Macron, how high do cases get?
How quickly is this thing going to burn through? But this is both milder by some very specific
definitions and wreaking more havoc on the health care system and the economy than at any prior
point in the pandemic. How is this possible? Well, it's possible because something can be milder
at the individual level, meaning just in that these are made up numbers. Imagine that before.
If you were infected, not remember, cases are ones we know about, infections are infections,
whether we count them or not. For every given infection, imagine that before there was a one
percent chance of being hospitalized and now it's a zero point five percent. These
are imaginary numbers. Wow. The risk of hospitalization has gone down by half.
But if it's three times as contagious or four times as contagious, while any individual is at
lower risk of hospitalization at the societal level, the total number of people hospitalized
is going to go up. And that is exactly what is going on, and that's where I want to start today.
The number of hospitalized individuals in the United States right now is higher
than at any previous point in the pandemic. Now there's a bunch of very important caveats here.
So as you can see, there was this previous peak at about one hundred and 33000 in January of 2021,
and we are now at 100. And where exactly are we? One hundred and 37000 almost and still climbing.
There is a really important caveat here, which is good news, and it's causing the reporting to
have to be changed. There are a ton of people who show up in this chart as hospitalized with COVID.
Who are actually in the hospital for something else, and they have incidentally tested positive.
That's a really good thing in terms of the severity question in New York City.
There was a report that said half of those that show up as hospitalized with COVID
aren't hospitalized because their COVID requires hospitalization. They're there for a broken leg,
a heart attack, something else. That's a really good sign and that mitigates the insanity of these
numbers, which are only going to keep going up for at least a couple of weeks. So that's
one thing. Secondly, have we reached the peak of cases where we are now going to see a decline?
Maybe. But if not, we're probably only seven to 10 days away. So as you can see, if you're watching,
we had this crazy day with nearly 900000 official cases, which suggests close to
two million infections, probably. And we've seen some of those numbers decline since
the average continues to climb. But it is starting to level out. The rate at which
the average is climbing is starting to level out. And that's a good thing. When you look at deaths,
it is going up, but it is going up at a rate much smaller than that, which cases have increased. If
you look at South Africa as what might be to come, you see that they hit their Omicron peak
very quickly and are down from 23000 cases a day to seven. So that's a decline of, you know,
about two thirds so far the U.K., which may be in terms of their timeline halfway between where
South Africa and the United States are. The UK has also seen a turnaround and a decline from about
180000 a day to 155, a decline of about, you know, roughly 15 18 percent, something like that. So
it seems we're probably getting there. The question will be, do we come out of this
without another variant that will be able to find a susceptible population? We don't know the answer
to that. A couple of other notable stories. United Airlines has announced that employee deaths from
COVID dropped to zero after they instituted their vaccine mandate. That's a very interesting story.
Axios has it, and I encourage you to read it. But the CEO wrote there are approximately 3000
employees who have tested positive for the virus. No vaccinated employees hospitalized as of late,
and that is a very, very interesting report. United operationally is still being affected
significantly because of people testing positive and having to quarantine and not
being able to work. But that's a really reassuring headline to a great degree about the vaccine.
We also have heard, Oh, and I apologize here. All of a sudden my my ad blocker is being rejected
by my browser. The Pfizer CEO says that the AMA cron vaccine will be ready in March. Now
there's two interpretations of this. One is by March, Micron will be long gone. It's just
it's too late. By that point, we won't need this vaccine anymore. I, from what I'm reading,
from serious virologists, that's not quite right. If we imagine that this is a possibility,
if future variants will be descendants of armor Quran because armor crime is so widespread. We
are still better off having a vaccine tailored to the lineage of Akron. It's still a good thing.
When it comes to this wave, it will be useless, without a doubt. But Pfizer CEO says al-Muqrin
vaccine will be ready in March, and that may be what helps prevent the next major wave. So that's
the latest when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. This is not about a segment about
mandates or masking or the drama over that. It's just. Here is where the numbers are
and the cautiously. Let me give you both the most pessimistic view and the most optimistic view.
We're probably somewhere in the middle is where we will come out. The most pessimistic view here is
there is no end to the variants. There will continue to be
new variants that are different enough from the ones that people have been exposed to,
that they will continue to find a large vulnerable population and we're going to keep having these
massive massive spikes 15 20 percent of the country at once. Infected disruptions to
people's jobs. Disruptions to supply chains. This is never going to end. The counterpoint to this
is this is extremely contagious, but on average it is milder. On average it is milder
and we are by so rapidly exposing essentially everybody to this.
We are going to be able to really quickly get beyond this wave with a shorter opportunity for
a variant that is dramatically different enough for this to happen again in three or four months,
that that would be the optimistic. It'll probably be somewhere in the middle.
I'm leaning towards the slightly more optimistic from what I'm reading so far.