Dr. Robin’s Covid-19 Updates

Covid Holiday Planning, Mostly

As variants sputter along

Robin Schoenthaler, MD
5 min readOct 10, 2022

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(I’m a Boston-based cancer doctor and I’ve been writing weekly fact-based-no-blame-no-rumors-all-science-all-the-time essays about Covid-19 since March 2020. If you liked this and some of my other missives, you can support both Medium and me here.)

We are in a stage of the “mostlies.”

Things Covid-wise are mostly pretty good right now, with most of our numbers (deaths, hospitalizations, cases) mostly at lowish points. Not the lowest they’ve ever been but close and currently going downward and we always love downward.

However, as we approach another winter, I think it’s reasonable to expect our numbers will go up to some degree and we should be prepared for this.

Both our 2020 and 2021 winters were dreadful, but they were dreadful for different reasons:

  • The winter of 2020 was terrible because so many people were unvaccinated
  • The winter of 2021 was tough because Omicron appeared and was/is so contagious that jillions of people got infected which led to a higher number (not proportion) of deaths.

The hope is this winter, while worse than right now, will mostly be better than last…

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Robin Schoenthaler, MD

Covid-Translator. Cancer doc: ~Three decades at MGH. Writer and storyteller: Moth Grand Slam Champion. Mom. www.DrRobin.org, @robinshome, robinshome2@gmail.com