The Bad Side of Good COVID News

Two more COVID vaccines - one from Moderna (below), the other from AstraZeneca - are on the way, joining the Pfizer vaccine in the fight against the deadliest respiratory diseases known to humankind.  Swell.  Wonderful.  But why get excited over that when the news about the pandemic is so spectacularly bad that there's no bright side to it?

Here's the deal.  None of these vaccines will be widely available to the general public for several months, and even as more people get vaccinated, restrictions and regulations designed to stop or slow the spread of COVID will remain in place for a good deal of time after.  This is a roundabout way of saying that we'll have to continue for a long time to come walking into banks looking like we're about to rob them, regardless of vaccination progress.  Furthermore, the AstraZeneca vaccine test results have come under question, and skeptics are calling for more data on that matter.

But, with 267,000 deaths out of 13.4 million cases, the COVID mortality rate is 2 percent - much less than the 5.6 percent rate this past April, so that has to count for something, right?  No, it doesn't have to - and it doesn't.  A 2 percent COVID mortality rate should not be taken to mean a 98 percent COVID recovery rate.  While many COVID patients have completely recovered, to be sure, there are many more who either haven't recovered or are still suffering aftereffects or continued severe symptoms.  It's not accurate to say that 98 percent of COVID patients have recovered; it's more accurate, and appropriate, to say that 98 percent of COVID patients haven't died.  Many locales don't even report a recovery rate; it's that irrelevant.  (One site estimates the recovery rate at a mere 59 percent.)  

But at least the pandemic could be worse than what is now, right?  It probably is.  While 13.4 million people in the U.S. are confirmed to have caught the COVID bug, some statisticians fear that the real infection rate is likely eight times that, meaning that over a third of the nation's population of 335 million have been infected.  If we get to herd immunity soon, it'll only be because of all of the cases out there that haven't been confirmed yet.

President-elect Biden says we're almost to the end of the pandemic, but it may turn out that we're only at the beginning of the end, or even the beginning of the beginning of the end.  There may be a light at the end of the tunnel.  But for many, that light could be an oncoming train.