July 4th last year was the start of a summer uptick. It fell again until Oct/Nov when the explosion began.
There was nothing puzzling about all that. The initial infection country wide concentrated in the Northeast. So that limited the numbers because the country as a whole has higher population than just the Northeast.
What would seem meaningful is the decline from April/May peak to the low early July was about 76%, which is pretty much the same % decline-from-peak as we see now, with the decline having gone flat. Does not say much for the vaccines.
Though three things worth noting. First, “fully vaccinated” has a very strict definition. Two doses 3 weeks minimum apart and then another 2 weeks after the 2nd dose. This means no one who started the vaccinations after essentially mid March is fully vaccinated and even fewer because people don’t rush out on day 21 after dose 1. Could be a week or two more. So call it early March.
The second item is forget cases. If you had strong symptoms (coughing and fever for days) pre vaccination, you’ll likely go get tested. But if you’re vaccinated, not fully vaccinated, just vaccinated, and symptoms arrive, you probably will presume you are mostly bulletproof and tough it out and not get tested. So we can’t have a case if we don’t have a positive test. You could be putting placebo in arms and cases will fall — because people just won’t bother getting tested.
Third, these vaccines were made a year ago. Then testing started. They are very old vaccines in a mutating environment. By the time they got serious numbers into arms in . . . maybe late February . . . well over 6 months of mutations and have a look at that death curve. The slope did not steepen. Not even a few degrees. No steepening at all, and now it has done the reverse. This really is impossible with vaccination numbers in the millions and millions. Unless they don’t work.
We don’t have enough people vaccinated to see major and obvious impacts yet. Israel does. They went from an average of nearly 10,000 cases per day and 100 deaths per day down to 52 cases per day and 1 death.
So clearly something is working.