Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy fall

This does not bode well for the next few months:

The US is now in the middle of what can only be described as a national Covid-19 epidemic, with cases across the country rising at alarming rates in recent weeks.

Public health experts look at a few markers to determine how bad things are in each state: the number of daily new cases; the infection rate, which can show how likely the virus is to spread; the percentage of tests that come back positive, which should be low in a state with sufficient testing; and the percentage of hospital beds that are occupied by very sick patients.

A Vox analysis indicates the vast majority of states report alarming trends across all four benchmarks for coronavirus outbreaks. Most states still report a high — sometimes very high — number of daily new Covid-19 cases. Most still have high infection rates. Most still have test positive rates that are too high, indicating they don’t have enough tests to track and contain the scope of their outbreaks. (The US overall has seen a decrease in new cases in recent weeks, but the numbers are still much too high.) And most still have hospitals with intensive care units that are too packed.

Across these benchmarks, no state fares well on all four metrics, which means no state has its epidemic fully under control right now. (Texas is excluded due to recent changes in how it reports tests.)

The president says it’s going to go away so everyone can relax. No need to mask up or anything because a waiter touched his face. And they aren’t really important despite what the head of the CDC said today:

“These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have. And I will continue to appeal for all Americans, all individuals in our country, to embrace these face coverings. I’ve said if we did it for 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine. Because the immunogenicity may be 70%, and if I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine’s not going to protect me. This face mask will.”

Just carry on. As Winston Churchill famously said, “yes, the Nazis are bombarding us daily but there’s no need to take reasonable precautions to avoid being killed because it will stop eventually.”