Like everyone else in the known universe, the global pandemic made us crazy for the better part of two years. We swung like a pendulum between exercising extreme vigilance and showing a middle finger. But we are much more optimistic now than at any other time across the past two years. Here is why.
A member of our community is married to a retired physicist who has been modeling the Covid-19 pandemic since it began. He has published an analysis of the current situation in the U.S., which you can study here.
This analysis is based on data from the CDC and Worldometer. It is for people in the community who are interested in a data-driven discussion of the current status of the pandemic. It is intended to be regarded as non-controversial.
Dr. Holtz’s analysis is replete with both visual and data analysis; here is the high-level summary:
“I expect that daily cases of Covid in the United States will decrease from the current (7/23/22) level of ~120,000 cases per day to about 35,000 cases a day by the first week in September and to 12,000 cases a day by the end of September. That is 1/10th of the current rate. This rate would be at or very near the lowest case rate experienced since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.”
In retrospect, Dr. Holtz acknowledges that his curve was ambitious and that case rates did not fall as quickly as his model suggested, but they are falling nonetheless. This analysis fuels our optimism about the conditions we will encounter in October.
Our ultimately successful in-person experience in 2021 involved the following conditions, which we intend to implement in 2022:
Our optimism notwithstanding, we will watch conditions closely as we approach the fall of 2022 and will communicate early and often if our protocols need to be amended.