Of course, there is no one right answer. I’ll have a future blog post on “endemic” and what it means. For now, I was thinking of last summer, pre-Delta, when the case count in New Hampshire was as low as 20 a day. I was tentatively venturing out then, even risking a vacation to the beach. Now those look like the good old days.
As I hope you know by now, comparing case counts pre- and post-Omicron is not valid because the number of Omicron cases is way higher, per hospitalized person for example, than pre-Omicron. So I looked up the valid comparison measures of hospitalizations and deaths. See Covidactnow.org charts below:
Of these, to me, hospitalization is the best metric. (People stay multiple days in the hospital, so the 20/day count of hospital patients, compared to the 20/day cases, does NOT mean that 100% of cases end up in the hospital.) I’ll be looking for hospitalization rates down in the 20’s. That will be about 10% of the current numbers, so we have a ways to go.
The other excellent metric to follow comes from the well-known Georgia Tech site (covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu), where they predict the probability of encountering one or more people currently with covid-19, based on the community spread numbers. So if I go into a small grocery store, let’s say assuming 100 people in the building, and the odds are less than 10% that there are one or more covid-positive people there, I would feel pretty good about that.
I don’t feel good at all about the current risk, which says that there is definitely some covid-19 virus in the air of that grocery store—see the graphic below. But we are moving in the right direction, as shown by the graphs above!
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