As I was preparing this week’s COVID Tracker, which is full of good news about how things are going in New Hampshire, I got a sobering reminder that not everything is great: My brother and his wife have gone into COVID quarantine.
They did this after learning that a friend had tested positive for COVID-19. Since they have a lot of elderly friends and live out West in an area with low vaccination rates, they decided to stay at home until they get the results of their COVID test, which will take several days.
They’re both vaccinated and have no symptoms so this probably wasn’t necessary, but when you’re dealing with a potentially fatal disease they thought that “better safe than sorry” was a reasonable approach.
And it can be fatal. Even though all the state’s COVID-19 numbers have fallen steadily for months and are as low as they have been since the pandemic began, three or four New Hampshire residents are still dying every week because the SARS-CoV2 virus gets into their lungs and slowly suffocates them. From a statistics point of view that’s good news but from a human point of view, of course, it’s a tragedy many times over.
Nonetheless, it appears that unless something untoward happens, we are in for a summer in which we can mostly pretend that the pan demic is over. The spread of the more contagious Delta variant is a concern but it appears to be contained by current vaccines, which makes it less worrisome in relatively well-vaccinated New England.
It’s almost certain that COVID-19 will make a resurgence in the fall. Continuing to increase the number of us who are vaccinated is our best bet to keep that resurgence at a reasonable level.
Updated charts and other information can be seen on the Monitor’s COVID-19 page at www.concordmonitor.com/Special-Sections/Covid-19.
How are we doing on vaccinations? Slowing down.
New Hampshire has left the mass-vaccination stage and has entered the one-person-at-a-time stage, in which doctors, nurses, family members and coworkers need to provide the access or do the convincing. As a result, the state’s chart has flattened out: the percentage of the population that is fully vaccinated rose only 1 percentage point in the past week, to 53.5%.
If that keeps up we won’t get to 70% vaccination until Halloween, and most people expect the rate of new vaccinations to get even slower. In other words, we’re probably not going to get close to any kind of “herd immunity.”
Number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths – what’s the trend? Very low and getting lower.
For all of these metrics, New Hampshire’s numbers are almost down to the levels of last July and August, which was the low point for the entire pandemic so far. There’s no reason to expect that the decline will not continue for at least the next month or two.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)