The New World is Not an Island; It's a World

Here's something that's true about the reporting on the pandemic and, specifically, the "end" of the pandemic:  the stories are just about the United States.  When the phrase "the end of the pandemic" is used, it actually means "the end of conditions in the United States which remind us that there's a pandemic, and the beginning of conditions which have some resemblance to normal life."  Using this understanding, we can see the "end" of the pandemic, anywhere between late 2021 and mid-2022.  However, long after we've declared, victory, the pandemic will still be raging in the rest of the world, with a non-zero chance of raging right back here with some new variant.

However, that doesn't mean that there's nothing of interest in this kind of reporting.  Researchers at Penn State are "co-coordinating" work by a consortium of researchers who are, in turn, consulting with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The “COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub"* has combined nine different research projections, using mathematical models, and we are told -

The most likely scenario is that children age 5 to 11 will be approved for vaccination and that no new superspreading variant will emerge... In this case, by March 2022, COVID-19 infections across the United States could slowly and steadily drop from about 140,000 per day today to about 9,000 per day, and deaths could decline from about 1,500 per day today to fewer than 100 per day.

As I've said elsewhere (and don't remember where), we won't know we're at the end of the pandemic unless we have a definition of what that means.  In this case, that means "fewer than 100" deaths per day.  You can pick a number below 100 and do the math, but the higher of those numbers brings us within the range of the historic annual death toll from the just plain normal flu.  

So we'll know we've reached the new world - and this will be, apparently, next March - when COVID is killing about as many of us as flu has in the past.  Assuming that the just plain normal flu will continue to kill us (the upcoming flu season is being described as "severe"), that in the new world, some kind of flu will be killing twice as many of us as some kind of flu did before COVID.

All of which assumes, of course, that the pandemic in the rest of the world will not intrude on our pandemic-free haven.  Sounds like a mirage to me, and a new world that I'd prefer to move through on the way to a truly healthy world world.

 * = Don't follow this link unless you know all the statistical jargon.