That’s the new variant for this week. I am not worried about it, but there is little other news on the Covid front and I’m still attempting not to reuse titles. As time goes by the events are still new but they tend to rhyme. This update is inessential.

In addition to various non-Covid stuff I’m putting at the end, which I anticipate will slowly grow as a section over time, this week’s other post is Criticism of EA Criticism Contest. If you find that is relevant to your interests, with an additional copy on the EA forum. If it is not relevant to your interests you can safely skip it.

Executive Summary

BA.2.75 is potentially a thing, unclear if it is a meaningful thing yet.
Spike in deaths that is likely a data artifact.
A reminder we could be working faster towards

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 700k cases (+5%) and 2,250 deaths (-1%)

Results: 746k cases (+10%) and 2,885 deaths (+27%).

Prediction for next week: 750k cases (+1%) and 2,450 deaths (-15%).

With BA.5 taking over it makes sense for there to be a modest rise in total cases about now, so even though I think the jump was partly a holiday backfill my guess is we catch back up there. For deaths the details look a lot like backfills and spikes in reporting rather than an actual increase in deaths, so my guess is that it largely reverts but uncertainty prevents predicting a full reversion.

Deaths

Diving into the state-by-state data shows a bunch of places that are getting increasingly lazy with when they report deaths. A bunch of them happened to report substantial numbers of deaths this week (and Florida, which reported zero, was adjusted while the others weren’t because it’s not obvious how to do that properly). The regional numbers end up looking mostly sane aside from the Western spike.

Cases

An estimate that at least in the UK we’re catching almost none of the child cases anymore, and not that many adult ones either. Seems likely to be right.

BA.2.75 Our Price Cheap

BA.2.75 is suddenly something people are talking about as rising rapidly, a subvariant of BA.2. We will not be calling it Centaurus. Here we go again?

Go go gadget log scale.

And yet:

My guess is this probably isn’t going to be an impactful thing, to the extent it is a thing at all. If it is, w...

Gamer Eighty

Gamer Eighty

Gamer Eighty

Gamer Eighty