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In this issue

Results: Will there be a week with 40,000 new Covid-19 hospitalizations in the US by end of 2023?

Average reader forecast: 38%

Your forecast: [100823 GOES HERE]%

Rising Covid immunity

Most readers expect Covid to be milder this winter, as indicated by the fact that most of you don’t think we’ll see 40,000 hospitalizations in a week—as we did last year.

The case for optimism is pretty simple: rising immunity from vaccines and previous infection is enough to incrementally dampen Covid’s toll.

30%: As more and more people will have had COVID and/or a vaccine, severity should be decreasing in general. So I'd expect that even if there are high case numbers, there should not be a proportional rise in hospitalisations

One reader also noted the trend this year toward warmer weather which might curb time spent indoors:

10%: Warmer weather, new variant vaccine, and rising immunity

But what’s the counterargument? People are increasingly unwilling to change their behavior, and policymakers have partly moved on:

70%: people think contagion was all in the past; no one knows if shots protect against the new variants; behavior has not changed.

90%: Against the backdrop of a nation in declining health (metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular compromise), the increasingly-mutated virus will stage a surprising comeback, especially in the red states and rural areas particularly under-prepared to handle it. Unfortunately, whether the morbidity and mortality is publicly recognized as Covid-related is uncertain.

One other worrying thread in your rationales took aim at the thrust of the question: Is CDC data on Covid hospitalizations even a good measure of the prevalence of the disease?

10%: I don't think it's an issue of whether the number will be hit, but the lack of data available.

50%: This is a tough one. I think we'll see a spike, but whether those cases will be formally tested so that they "count" is another thing altogether.

Only 35% of you correctly answered this week's trivia: Vaccination rates differ drastically between Blue and Red states. Of the states that Biden won in 2020, which has the lowest share of residents fully vaccinated? The answer is Georgia.

Nonrival

Results: Rising Covid immunity

In this issue

Rising Covid immunity

Nonrival

Scores: 📉 Consumer sentiment went down

Recap: Vibes will keep improving

Are the bad economic vibes over?