I don't know which COVID statistics are believable any longer. The stats from India, Russia and Florida were never reliable and now... even if we take out politically-motivated psychopaths like Modi, Putin and DeSantis and there is no intention to deceive, who knows what's accurate and what's guess work? As for new cases, are people reporting test results? Yesterday, the U.S. reported 62,993 new one-day cases and 263 new deaths. But plague-ridden states like Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Tennessee, Arizona, South Carolina, Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah, Iowa, South Dakota and Wyoming didn't report at all.
In terms of deaths per million residents, stats look reasonable since the worst states are all states with terrible vaccination rates. These are the half dozen states, you might want to go live in if you're interested in committing suicide by COVID:
Mississippi- 4,181 deaths per million (52% fully vaccinated)
Arizona- 4,115 deaths per million (62% fully vaccinated)
Alabama- 3,991 deaths per million (51% fully vaccinated)
Tennessee- 3,830 deaths per million (54% fully vaccinated)
West Virginia- 3,826 deaths per million (58% fully vaccinated)
Arkansas- 3,773 deaths per million (54% fully vaccinated)
Worldwide, maybe there's something to be gleaned by looking at the number of cases that are considered serious or critical, a number that is probably somewhat trustworthy, at least in non-agrarian societies. These are the current worst hit 10:
Brazil- 8,318
Mexico- 4,798
Indonesia- 2,771
Russia- 2,300
France- 1,677
USA- 1,562
Thailand- 1,496
Germany- 1,446
Poland- 1,321
Bangladesh- 1,297
And the most deaths on Friday were reported in the U.S. (#1 even without so many red states reporting), U.K., Brazil, Germany, Russia, France, South Korea, Italy, Thailand and Spain. I'm worried. My friends are out and about again as though it's all over. My friend Dave flew down to Oaxaca last week and was gobsmacked to get off the plane and find everyone masked up. Roland flew back from Hawaii a few days ago and said virtually no one on the plane was wearing a mask.
Yesterday, the NY Times reported that most American states are reporting increased cases and increased hospitalizations this month. Only 3 states didn't have increases yet, "signaling a wave that is increasingly national in scope... Case counts have become an increasingly unreliable measure of the virus’s true toll, as Americans increasingly turn to at-home tests that go unreported. That has prompted some officials to put more emphasis on hospitalization rates as a measure of the virus’s true impact."
Ozzy Osbourne, who has Parkinson's disease, is the same age as I am and he has been careful throughout the pandemic. And yesterday he was diagnosed with COVID. Yesterday was also when the Washington Post reported something I knew was coming and feared: Covid death no longer overwhelmingly among unvaccinated as toll on elderly grows. I was unsympathetic over the last year when the deaths were primarily among people who decided not to get vaccinated. I admit I kind of wished a few million Trumpers would die-- like 10 million. Gruesome, I know. No one's perfect. But now "the pandemic’s toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to get shots, with vaccine protection waning over time and the elderly and immunocompromised-- who are at greatest risk of succumbing to covid-19, even if vaccinated-- having a harder time dodging increasingly contagious strains. The vaccinated made up 42 percent of fatalities in January and February during the highly contagious omicron variant’s surge, compared with 23 percent of the dead in September, the peak of the delta wave... Seniors are overwhelmingly immunized, but vaccines are less effective and their potency wanes over time in older age groups."
As a group, the unvaccinated remain far more vulnerable to the worst consequences of infection-- and are far more likely to die-- than people who are vaccinated, and they are especially more at risk than people who have received a booster shot.
...The bulk of vaccinated deaths are among people who did not get a booster shot, according to state data provided to The Post. In two of the states, California and Mississippi, three-quarters of the vaccinated senior citizens who died in January and February did not have booster doses. Regulators in recent weeks have authorized second booster doses for people over the age of 50, but administration of first booster doses has stagnated.
...Hospitals, particularly in highly vaccinated areas, have also seen a shift from covid wards filled predominantly with the unvaccinated. Many who end up in the hospital have other conditions that weakens the shield afforded by the vaccine.