Well, it has certainly been awhile since we looked in on our pandemic – about 9 weeks since I last wrote about Covid, actually. So I assume that it’s all pretty much under control. I see all the Republican Governors have ordered their public schools to re-open with face-to-face instruction. Colleges are haphazardly in session. Restaurants and gyms are open. Hell, even college football is back! WE BEAT COVID. What a relief. What a victory. I guess all the other countries are looking to the US for leadership now in fighting this scourge. Best practices and all that.

Wait. What? 45,000 new cases a day? 800 US citizens dying every day? 3rd leading cause of death in the nation? Testing numbers are down? 5 to 7 days to get test results? False positives? False negatives? No contact tracing? “Turned the corner”? “Doesn’t really impact anyone”?

The juxtapositioning of those 2 paragraphs above is an enigma. They cannot both be true. That would be impossible in a developed nation. Let’s see what’s going on.

Current Situation – All of the above is true. This is what happens when you have an Orange Moron surrounded by sycophants leading the most powerful nation in the world. This country has no national plan to deal with the worst infectious disease outbreak in over a century. All of the White House effort is focused on denying the pandemic’s impacts and on changing the subject. Any competent voice is sidelined and then replaced with someone in line with the Orange One’s thinking (and I use that term in it’s most generous definition). We no longer, as a nation, lurch from crisis to crisis in dealing with Covid, we simply deny that there are any crises. Thousands are dying needlessly every week and the media are tiring of covering that story and the public is tiring of hearing about it. The result is that these people are dying anonymously and to no great effect on the nations conscience. What a horror. We are averaging over 40,000 new cases of Covid per day in September. That number is about 50% more than we averaged in April when we were all scared out of our wits. We’ve become inured to these horrible numbers and, as a nation, we are becoming more and more like our leaders. That’s not pretty.

Near Future – For much of the nation, we are heading into the colder months. That means more crowded, in-door conditions. The perfect environment for this particular virus to spread and to wreak havoc. It will. Cases will rise steadily. After a 3 week lag, cases among the vulnerable will rise. After another 3 week lag, hospitalizations will rise, and then deaths. Because of advances in treatment and medical practices, the latter 2 categories may not increase like they did last Spring. Nevertheless, we are in for a rough winter.

Influenza – Public health officials are greatly concerned about the population consequences of having an uncontrolled Covid outbreak coinciding with the flu season. The stress on the health care system may be enormous. While I agree that the combination of those 2 stressors on a fragile health care system is frightening to contemplate, I believe that this will be the most mild flu season that we have seen in recent memory. To be clear, I am not predicting that the individual flu virus will be less virulent than recent strains, just that the spread of the flu will be greatly reduced. We have never faced a flu season when so many people are aware of distancing, hand washing (very effective in fighting flu), and even masks. I think we’re going to frustrate the hell out of the flu this year. So, I put that out there and, as far as I know, I’m the only expert saying it. I may end up looking like a fool, but I doubt it.

Longer-Term Future – Next year is going to look a lot like 2020 did, I’m afraid. Two exceptions to that prediction are that we will be starting at about 70,000 cases per day of Covid nationally in January, 2021 as opposed to about 0 cases in January, 2020. Happy New Year. The other exception will be the gradual inoculation of part of the population with a vaccine throughout the Spring and Summer months. With luck, we can begin to return to normal in late Summer – early Fall of next year.

That’s it for now. Stay safe. Stay outside. Stay apart. Wear a mask.