Published on: September 9, 2021
MNB Covid-19 Coronavirus Update
Random and illustrative stories about the global pandemic and how businesses and various business sectors are trying to recover from it, with brief, occasional, italicized and sometimes gratuitous commentary…
• In the United States, we've now had 41,397,587 Covid-19 coronavirus cases, resulting in 671,183 deaths and 31,667,507 reported recoveries.
Globally, there have been 223,509,451 coronavirus cases, with 4,612,004 resultant fatalities and 200,055,619 reported recoveries. (Source.)
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 73.3 percent of the US population age 12 and older has received at least one dose of vaccine, with 62.4 percent being fully vaccinated.
• From the New York Post:
"They are the new 99 percenters - the vast majority of Americans who are getting serious cases of COVID-19 or dying are unvaccinated.
"While COVID-19 cases continue to spike across the US, the overwhelming majority of deaths and hospitalizations from the virus continue to overwhelmingly be among unvaccinated Americans, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30, about 99 percent of hospital admissions were among those who hadn’t been fully inoculated, which is defined by the CDC as two weeks after the second dose of a Pfizer or Moderna shot or two weeks after Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose jab."
• Axios reports that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)says that "Americans are now getting infected with COVID-19 at 10 times the rate needed to end the pandemic, which will persist until more people get vaccinated."
"The endgame is to suppress the virus," Fauci says. "Right now, we're still in pandemic mode, because we have 160,000 new infections a day. That's not even modestly good control ... which means it's a public health threat … In a country of our size, you can't be hanging around and having 100,000 infections a day. You've got to get well below 10,000 before you start feeling comfortable."
Fauci notes that once enough people have been vaccinated, "you'll still get some people getting infected, but you're not going to have it as a public health threat."
• And, a cautionary note from the Wall Street Journal:
"The last flu season was mild. The coming one is expected to be worse, concerning hospitals overrun by Delta cases. 'We are worried,' one hospital official said.
"The season could also strike earlier and more severely than usual, doctors and researchers said, because many people haven’t been able to build up their natural immune defenses while working from home and avoiding strangers.
"Several factors are behind the expectations for a potentially difficult flu season, though it is notoriously hard to predict how badly the virus will hit."