We are about to enter a bad bad stretch when it comes to COVID. Cases are climbing across the country (in some cases aggressively) likely due to
A) COVID fatigue
B) increased viral lifetime due to cold weather
C) More ppl indoors in general
But unlike the spring..

State and local Gov’t will not be nearly as fast to react. Between COVID fatigue, COVID deniers, court cases limiting state/local exec authority, and lack of direction from the federal Gov’t, those in charge will take weeks from now to make changes

But it’s basically too late..

States like Iowa and South Dakota will be functionally out of ICU beds in a week +/-. Other states will follow suit. While therapeutics are helping to an extent, the %hospitalized it still about where it was over the last months, as is mortality (~1.5-2%)

That means when you see “130k Americans were diagnosed with COVID yesterday”, what it really means is “2000-2500 Americans will die from COVID over the next 3 weeks. We are seeing those numbers _every day_ now. I haven’t seen any data yet that convinces me...

That the math there doesn’t hold true. Combined with what is likely widespread community spread in states with few COVID controls and hospitals that can’t handle the load, and it only gets worse from here.

My only hope is therapeutics get in wider distribution quickly..

And there is some evidence of that, but I think a material impact from therapeutics is more a late Dec/early Jan timeframe. And material impact from a vaccine is Apr/May timeframe.

tl;dr Nov/Dec is gonna SUCK from a COVID perspective.