I feel like I should put this here

I stumbled across this kind of randomly while wandering around the internets and, for a couple different reasons, thought I should share it.

As mentioned previously, I’ve had the pandemic right up in my face pretty much since the beginning. I’ve watched it spread, wax, wane, wax again and, most significantly I think, I’ve dealt with essentially nothing else in my professional life. My therapist pointed out to me recently that when you’re that close to something, it tends to look very large. Sometimes disproportionately so.

I am by no means downplaying what’s going on. We’re still really not in a good place when in comes to case numbers, rate of spread, and available hospital resources. Models are predicting that the omicron surge will peak in 2-3 weeks with close to 1,000,000 new cases per day in the United States. Keep in mind, too, that the official counts are still, very likely, drastically undercounting. This graph is wastewater analysis from Boston showing the increase in viral DNA in sewage. The spike from omicron completely obliterates the spikes from all the other surges we’ve seen so far suggesting that there are likely significantly more cases than have been recognized;

All that said, we have come a long way from the beginning and there is still hope that we can survive this with something that looks more or less like modern society relatively intact.

Now we come to what brought me here today;

“Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE)” is written by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, biostatistician, professor, researcher, wife, and mom of two little girls. During the day she has a research lab and teaches graduate-level courses, but at night she writes this newsletter. Her main goal is to “translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well equipped to make evidence-based decisions, rather than decisions based in fear. 

The most recent newsletter is entitled “There is good news” and is worth a read. Things are bad but they could be worse and they will get better. Eventually.

Anyway, read it and feel some momentary relief from the doom that I’ve been spouting.

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good-news