CDC Director: Impending Doom for the mostly-vaccinated U.S.

by philg

From state-sponsored media (NPR) yesterday, “CDC Director Fears ‘Impending Doom’ If U.S. Opens Too Quickly”:

In an emotional plea during the White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing on Monday, the CDC chief, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, described a feeling of “impending doom.”

The cause of her concern? A rising number of coronavirus cases in the United States. The most recent seven-day average is just below 60,000 cases per day – a 10% increase compared with the previous week.

Hospitalizations are up, too: about 4,800 admissions per day over the last week, up from an average 4,600 per day in the previous seven-day period. And deaths, which tend to lag cases and hospitalizations, have also begun to rise: increasing nearly 3%, to a seven-day average of about 1,000 per day.

I wonder which states she could be talking about?

“We’re in the life and death race with a virus that is spreading quickly, with cases rising again,” Biden said at the White House on Monday afternoon. “New variants are spreading and sadly some of the reckless behavior we’ve seen on television over the past few weeks means more cases are to come in the weeks ahead.”

Our greatest scientist:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed. “If we open up completely now, that is premature, given the level of infection” currently seen in the U.S., Fauci said. He added that even as the warm weather gives us the urge “to just cut loose, we’ve just got to hang in there a bit longer.” The likely reason for the uptick in cases, he said, is that states are opening up too quickly.

At first glance, a forecast of impending doom makes sense. However bad things were in the past, they can only get worse. Sweden gave the finger to the coronavirus and now only 99.87 percent of Swedes remain alive (see also Sweden will have a lower death rate in 2020 than it had in 2010). But the virus that killed 0.13 percent of Swedes attacked a population that was initially uninfected and unvaccinated. The doomsayer’s own agency estimates that roughly half of Americans have already had COVID-19. And the NPR article says that most of the Americans who are potentially vulnerable to dying from COVID-19 have already been vaccinated:

Among seniors, 73% have now received at least their first dose. Among all U.S. adults, 36% have received at least one dose. And more than 50 million Americans – nearly one in five adults — are fully vaccinated.

The CDC says that the vaccines are 90 percent effective (new paper). The CDC says that COVID-19 is “involved” in deaths primarily among those 65 and over:

(Biology students should note that #Science says it is “All Sexes” and not “Both Sexes”.)

How do we combine all of the above into “impending doom”? We have immunity from infection + immunity among the older/vulnerable from vaccines + #science saying that vaccines are 90% effective = doom.

Less dramatically, how can all of the above combine to yield the rising hospitalization and death rates described in the article?

Related… the CDC itself says that the vaccines don’t work well enough to exempt the vaccinated from COVID-19 testing on returning to the U.S.:

(Maybe the fear of letting a vaccinated, yet COVID-19-positive, person into a country that has more than 60,000 new “cases” (positive PCR tests) is that the traveler will bring a radical variant to our shores? But if the variant is truly radical, wouldn’t a standard PCR test come back negative anyway?)

And from our science-following leader, “Biden Pushes Mask Mandate as C.D.C. Director Warns of ‘Impending Doom’” (NYT):

President Biden, facing a rise in coronavirus cases around the country, called on Monday for governors and mayors to reinstate mask mandates as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of “impending doom” from a potential fourth surge of the pandemic.

Masks worked for the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia, so they will make all the difference here…

If the forecast of “doom” has you rethinking your migration-via-Cirrus-or-Bonanza… “Psaki: Biden, Harris fly private, don’t need to follow CDC travel suggestions” (New York Post, yesterday):

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris don’t need to worry about flouting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations against nonessential travel, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

The reason: They both fly private.

Psaki made the comments after being asked at her daily press briefing about the commander-in-chief’s recent trips amid continued advisories from the health agency against traveling — even if fully vaccinated.

“I would say that the president travels, as does the vice president, on a private plane. That is the purview of every president and vice president throughout American history,” the press secretary said of Air Force One and Two.

So it is a pretty bad doom, but it likely won’t be bad for those who fly private! (see The social justice of coronashutdowns)

Related:

25 thoughts on “CDC Director: Impending Doom for the mostly-vaccinated U.S.”

  1. Vaccines (and previous infection) don’t offer 100% protection. The concern is probably mostly around US has rising numbers of infections and reduced mitigations. This may only be partially countered by the rising numbers of those vaccinated (and having been infected).

    In the UK, the estimate with 100% vaccinations (in reality obviously not all will be vaccinated) and the vaccines we use, hospitalisations would reduce roughly 80%:
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2021/mar/29/uk-covid-live-news-england-lockdown-latest-updates-boris-johnson-coronavirus?page=with:block-6061fc198f0867d2736588d2#block-6061fc198f0867d2736588d2

    There are also concerns about the US rise of the B.1.1.7 variant (which the UK already has), which is 50% more transmissible (the graph suggests the variant should already have reached 50% prevalence in the US):
    https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1376960485522804742

    • More from Eric Feigl-Ding, this time on Chile, where vaccinations are higher than US/UK (though with Sinovac), yet rising rates (with UK/Brasilian variants):
      “My take—I’ve said many times before this was my biggest fear, more than even mutations. That the moment we start vaccinating, political leaders will get pressure to immediately reopen before enough people been vaccinated. And political pressure will build more and more….”
      https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1377031317439791104

  2. I think the problem here is that the politicians have largely abdicated responsibility (except in states like Fla., Tx., SD, etc) and have left it it to the doctors (typically not scientists, just doctors, i.e. the people who are trained to repair the broken parts of the human body) to make these pronouncements & decisions. So if you are a doctor the primary issue of importance is health — to a hammer everything looks like a nail. It is a real loser for a doctor personally to recommend anything other than complete precaution since there is no upside for him or her personally and a lot of personal downside for making the wrong decision or pronouncement. Though for the rest of us and ideally the politicians these decisions should be based on a balance of risks, such as they are, vs. the rewards of a normal life.

  3. I’m surprised Fauci still has the gall (or the total lack of self awareness) to say “we’ve just got to hang in there a bit longer” when this is quite literally what he has been saying for an entire year, starting back when it was “14 days to flatten the curve.” Given that “a bit longer” has been empirically shown to mean more than a year, I for one am not willing to hang in there for “a bit longer.”

  5. Life is deadly. The death rate of life is literally 1 per person. Our hospitals are full of people who are alive and the rate of new people becoming infected with life is staggering. We should stop living immediately to flatten the curve.

  10. Vaccination will not release us. If only 0.01% of the vaccinated population gets reinfected, everyone must still follow all protocols:

    “Out of the 1.2 million people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in Washington, epidemiologists have reported evidence of 102 breakthrough cases in 18 counties since Feb. 1, representing less than 0.01% of all fully vaccinated individuals in the northwestern U.S. state. ”

    https://abcnews.go.com/Health/100-fully-vaccinated-people-contract-covid-19-washington/story?id=76784838

    “Finding evidence of vaccine breakthrough cases reminds us that, even if you have been vaccinated, you still need to wear a mask, practice socially distancing, and wash your hands to prevent spreading COVID-19 to others who have not been vaccinated,” Dr. Umair Shah, Washington state’s secretary of health, said in a statement Tuesday.”

    And once everyone *has* been vaccinated, everyone will “still need to wear a mask, practice socially distancing [sic] and wash [their] hands to prevent spreading COVID-19 to those who have already been vaccinated” because the vaccines do not confer immunity, they just make you less sick when you get it. And the protection will diminish over time, and require new vaccines to be developed on a rolling basis.

    Forever. Into perpetuity.

    It will never, ever end.

  11. The New Contract with America has been MADE. The transformation is being rammed through. We’re moving to a Modern Monetary Theory / Socialist State. COVID will not allow us to go back to “normal” – EVER. It’s over. It’s a done deal. It has happened. That’s why 21 Senate Democrats are calling for essentially permanent stimulus payments. Cause we ain’t never going back to normal, baby!

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/30/stimulus-check-update-senators-push-biden-to-send-recurring-payments.html

    “This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads,” the senators wrote. “Families should not be at the mercy of constantly-shifting legislative timelines and ad hoc solutions.”

  12. The US, along with the rest of the world, missed an opportunity to control the corona virus back in the spring 2020. In order to control the corona virus, you need to do a total lock down for at least 2 months and then very slowly open up with strict controls. For example take a look at China, they closed down for months back in the spring of 2020, brought the virus under control and then very slowly opened up the economy. Today, China still has controls, temperature checking, masks indoors and etc, but life and the economy is pretty much back to normal, meanwhile most of the world is looking at mutations of the virus causing a third wave.

    So you do not trust China? Australia and Taiwan also implemented very strict lock downs and achieved similar results in controlling the virus.

    What would life be like in the US today, if it implemented the same lock down and controls as China back in the Spring of 2020?

    The Czech Republic is a great example of what happens if you end the controls and lock down too early and everybody goes back to normal and then the second wave hits and takes you out.

    The goal of the strict lock downs and controls is not to reduce the R value just below 1 and hope the virus goes away, the has to be to get the R value down to zero, otherwise you risk the virus mutating and all your vaccine efforts become less effective due to the virus mutating and the shit show starts all over again.

    This is not just political, it is cultural, the US, along with most of the world, is just not culturally capable of dealing with the corona virus.

    • Our state media reported just a couple months ago that China was starting another round of stay-at-home lockdowns, “as well as bans on gatherings, school suspensions and the closing off of some villages and residential communities.” So even in countries that “did everything right” according to what you would like to see done, life is not nearly back to normal. At least not a normal consistent with the ideals of a free society in which the government does not lock you in your house for a few weeks every year.

      https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/01/09/955298826/millions-in-china-under-new-restrictions-amid-covid-19-spike-near-beijing

    • Pavel: https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/ predicted all of this in April 2020. A police state would be able to make lockdowns work (at least until they reopened to the rest of the world). Nations that have oceans as border walls would be able to keep out the virus (that islands could become virus-free fortresses was part of the W.H.O.’s standard pandemic thinking at least as far back as 2009; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/02/23/who-guidance-on-pandemics-then-and-now/ ).

      Part of the difference between being competent at public health and talking about stuff that might work in a lab is factoring in actual conditions on the ground. Neither the U.S. nor the Czech Republic could have waved a magic wand and swapped their respective political and government systems for the Chinese level of control and competence on March 1, 2020. What would the U.S. be like if we’d had a lockdown that eliminated the coronavirus from the entire resident population as of March 1, 2020? It would be exactly the same, since thousands of migrants come across the southern border every day and those migrants are coming from a part of the world that is thoroughly plagued (see https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ ).

      The Swedish MD/PhDs agree with your last statement (“just not culturally capable of dealing with the corona virus”). But they didn’t spend a year in lockdown before coming to that conclusion. They determined in February 2020 that Europe (and the U.S., probably, if they’d bothered to think about us) was not politically and culturally capable of eradicating the coronavirus and that therefore they had to learn to live with it. So they came up with a plan for what a reasonably rich, interesting, and productive life would look like given the existence of a virus that, like a bad influenza, would kill about 0.1% of the population (mostly the old and frail) annually. That’s a more useful exercise than wishing the U.S. were surrounded by the Southern Ocean.

    • Pavel: This just in, from the Department of You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide… https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/world/covid-france-lockdown.html

      After more than a year of lockdowns and months of sputtering vaccination campaigns, Europe’s efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic suffered another setback on Wednesday when President Emmanuel Macron of France announced a new set of restrictive measures in a desperate move to halt a new deadly wave. The move imposed a third national lockdown for a month, which he had long tried to avoid.

      ————-

      See also https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ in which France has a higher death rate tagged to COVID-19 than give-the-finger-to-the-virus Sweden.

    • philig: It is not about the government having a Chinese level of control over the population, it is about the culture of the population responding to the corona virus threat. The Chinese government is large, but the population is even larger, if a significant percentage of the population did not want to go with the lock down, the government would not be able to enforce a lock down. During WW2 a large percentage of the population in the US gave up their personal freedoms, in some cases including their life in battle, to fight Nazi German and Imperial Japan. Having the US population listen and go into a lock down for a couple of months and watch Netflix should be easy compared to what the US did in WW2. If the US population today had the culture that it had in WW2, would it have responded better to the corona virus?

      If a part of the US population goes into lock down and the other part decides to go wild parties, churches and other indoor events, or packed outdoor events, then any lock down that the US government (or any other government), will be absolutely useless. You might as well have no lock down as in Sweden and party like it is 2019.

      What percentage of the migrants at the US/Mexico boarder are infected with the corona virus? If the US is in a lock down it should be relatively simple to gather up the majority of migrant and test them. China has long boarders with many countries and does have problems with thousands of migrants. But they still manage to control the corona virus, by rounding up migrants, putting them in hotels and testing them.
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-border-idUSKBN21L1B8

      It is not about the government forcing you to lock down inside your home, it is about the population deciding that it would be a good idea to limit contact to reduce the R value to zero.

    • Pavel: You’re saying that the U.S. population has a culture that is defective and incompatible with competent handling of the coronavirus. But the culture of the U.S. was already known in February 2020 and couldn’t be wished into some different form. So it is an academic exercise to talk about how the U.S. could/should have handled coronavirus if the U.S. were populated, e.g., exclusively by Chinese people educated in China.

      It should be “relatively simple to gather up the majority of migrant and test them”? How did the U.S. end up with as many as 29 million undocumented migrants, nearly all of whom are here contrary to federal law (not to say that they’re “illegal” of course, since no human is illegal), if it is simple to gather them up and if taxpayers are already spending $81 billion/year on the Department of Homeland Security? (see https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/fy_2021_dhs_bib_0.pdf )

    • philg: I did not say that U.S. population has a culture that is defective, it is just not capable of responding to the corona virus. It could be that the US culture has advantages in other areas, because of its individualism. An example of this individualism and culture could be why companies like SpaceX are in the US.

      We did know the culture of US in February 2020 as we did in December 7, 1941. The difference is in the way the US culture adapted and responded to a threat. In February 2020, there was nothing preventing the US culture from adapting and decide to reduce the R value to zero and then carefully reopen. As for freedoms, everybody still would have had the freedom to gather online, criticize and organize during the lock down and most of the freedoms to gather and party indoors in person would have been back in a couple of months. Maybe the US culture was worried that if it lock down for a couple of months it would become China? Has the US culture lost its flexibility to respond to threats that require a collective effort? The US culture responded to the threat in WW2 and then went back to normal after WW2, changed yes, but it was still the US. It has nothing to do with the US being populated exclusively by Chinese people educated in China

      As for the 29 million illegals, this is a combination of the US government not being effective at controlling the boarder, the other reason is that people will risk migrating to what they consider a better place to live, you have to make the US a worst place to live for the migrants compared to from where they are running and they will stop arriving at the boarder.

    • How does the ~2 year reduction in life expectancy (an effect whose duration is still TBD) caused by unmitigated covid compare to the loss of european democracy or possibly of all democracies worldwide caused by an unmitigated nazi Germany in 1941?

    • ajm: The comparison of corona virus and Nazi Germany 1941 is that they can be seen as threats to the US. Total US deaths in WW2 was 418,500 (over 5 years), due to Covid was 552,000 (over 1 year) and climbing. The population of the US is now 338 mil compare to 139 mil in 1945. Covid is killing US people faster than WW2.

      It could be that the culture of the US does not see the corona virus as a significant threat, the deaths are mainly the old and sick, so who cares right, survival of the fittest, I want my freedom to go to south beach and party! What would the death rate have to be to be for the culture of the US to accept a lock down? Would a 5% or 25% or ??% death rate among the 20 to 30 year old justify a full lock down?

      In addition what will be the long term health costs of the survivors, that now have long term heart or lung damage? This could be a much greater concern than the death rate.

      There is also the question of the long term economic effects of partial lockdowns of the economy over long periods, over a year or 2, compared with a full lock down for a couple of months? I would estimate that a full lock down for a couple of months would be much less costly than the current shit show of now we are open, now we are closed, open again, closed again, can you guess if we will be open next week?

  14. If only our median, government and education department would use our crumbling education system as impending dooms day and lock up everything and force everyone to study and exercise imagine how much better off this country would be in 1 year.

    We are being feared of COVID-19 but don’t give a sh*t to our 3rd world class public education system that drags down society for generations.

    COVID-19 may kill you now quickly, but a dump down society will kill you slowly, over time and painfully.

  15. The biggest lie and the basis of the on-going bullshit is the idea that “we have to get this virus under control” — Fouci. Doesn’t anyone remember their Greek mythology, where pride is the downfall of the proud?

    The data is in (Sweden, Florida, etc.) We cannot control the virus and attempting to do so is just so much wasted energy. Masks and lock downs of the general public don’t do shit. The bottom line is that healthy people who are infected recover with no permanent damage; that is IF they develop symptoms at all! That’s been true for as long as the human race has walked the Earth with thousands of viruses. If it were not true, Homo Sapiens wouldn’t be here, eh?

    The fact that UNhealthy people are dying should surprise no one. When the camel already is obese, has heart disease, diabetes, or smokes, just one more straw breaks its back. (94% of deaths have two or more comorbidities.)

    Yes, we have a health crisis but it has been in progress for 50 years and has almost nothing to do with SARS CoV-2.

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