Late Stage Covid
A rather remarkable thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday: My Twitter timeline and TikTok “For You” page proved to be a useful epidemiological barometer. It started as a trickle of anecdotal tweets. Wow, like half the people in my group chat have COVID. People began retweeting photos of COVID testing lines sprawling down sidewalks. By Wednesday, my TikTok page was an endless series of videos from total strangers that looked like this:
After a weekend of vaccinated and boosted holiday party-going and general life-living, the Omicron variant appears to have made solid landfall in major American cities, and things are moving quickly:
Very quickly:
A steep increase in cases was, of course, expected and follows trends from the United Kingdom and South Africa. Even so, the rise feels stark. The chart that stood out to me is this one, from Cornell University:
What the chart doesn’t
