Covid four years later

New guidance from the CDC:

People who test positive for Covid-19 no longer need to routinely stay away from others for at least five days, according to new guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued Friday. The change ends a strategy from earlier in the pandemic that experts said has been important to controlling the spread of the infection.

The agency says it’s updating its recommendations for Covid-19 to bring them in line with its advice for other kinds of respiratory infections, including influenza and RSV. Offering a single set of unified guidance will make people more likely to follow it, agency experts said in a news briefing on Friday.

Namely, the CDC now says people who have Covid-19 should stay home until they’ve been fever-free without medication for at least 24 hours or their symptoms have been improving for 24 hours.

After that, it’s fine to resume regular activities, agency experts say. But they recommend that people take additional precautions for the next five days — including improving ventilation, masking and limiting close contact with others — to lower the risk of spreading the virus.

These enhanced precautions are particularly important for people who are around vulnerable individuals, such as those who are elderly or have immune function that’s been blunted by medication or an illness, like cancer.

Annual official deaths in the US from Covid, March-February

2020-21: 539,000

2021-22: 444,000

2022-23: 134,000

2023-24: 65,000

Total: 1,182,000

Because of undercounting/net secondary effects, the excess death total over this four-year period indicates about 1.5 million more Americans have died since March of 2020 than would have in the absence of the pandemic.

Let’s remember how many people were supposed to die per the predictions of Elite Legal Brain:

The world is in a full state of panic about the spread and incidence of COVID-19. The latest world-wide tallies, as of this writing are:

The most dramatic news of the day has been the sudden spike in the number of Italian cases, totaling 24,747 with 1,809 deaths, which may grow to exceed the 3,099 in China.

Overlooked is the good news coming out of China, where the latest report shows 16 new cases and 14 new deaths, suggesting that the number of deaths in the currently unresolved group will be lower than the 5.3 percent conversion rate in the cases resolved to date. In my view, we will see a similar decline in Italy, for reasons that I shall outline in the remainder of this article.

From this available data, it seems more probable than not that the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000. In the United States, the current 67 deaths should reach about 5000 (or ten percent of my estimated world total, which may also turn out to be low).

[Correction & Addendum as of March 24, 2020: 

My original erroneous estimate of 5,000 dead in the US is a number ten times smaller than I intended to state, and it too could prove somewhat optimistic. But any possible error rate in this revised projection should be kept in perspective. The current U.S. death toll stands at 592 as of noon on March 24, 2020, out of about 47,000 cases. So my adjusted figure, however tweaked, remains both far lower, and I believe far more accurate, than the common claim that there could be a million dead in the U.S. from well over 150 million coronavirus cases before the epidemic runs its course.]