Hairyducked Idiot wrote:What I want to see soon is hospitalizations decoupling from cases. Right now, hospitalizations are dropping slower than cases are, roughly in line with what you'd expect from a 7-day lag between diagnosis and admission.
That makes me wonder if we're even seeing the effects of vaccines much at all yet. If things work the way I think they should work, within a few weeks, hospitalizations should be dropping faster than cases due to the focus of the vaccine on higher-risk categories. If that doesn't happen, something isn't working the way I imagine it works.
But man have cases plummetted. Down 38% in just 16 days. If we could do that three more times (38% drop over 16 days), we'd be below the September lows.
Many of the LTCF that we have been vaccinating are already on such strict protocols that cases and hospitalizations aren’t currently as high as you’d maybe expect in that population. I would say about half of the facilities I visited had no active infections with some stating they haven’t had any infections in “months”. In addition to the protocols, A TON of the residents have already had it so likely had some protection to begin with.
So my take is that the decreased rates and hospitalizations are primarily from all the HCW that have been vaccinated, which generally don’t result in hospitalizations anyway. Now that 1b (65+ and essential workers) started on Monday in IL, I’m projecting you’re going to start seeing those rates decouple in another week or two.
