Dr. Robin’s Covid-19 Updates
The Covid Wind-Down?
Maybe the benchmarks have arrived
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 essays below, you can support both Medium and me here
I’ve been writing Covid missives pretty much non-stop for three years but I paused writing them this winter.
I paused because things were improving so much. Everything we measure about Covid was getting better — cases, deaths, hospitalizations. And no scary mutants were appearing.
And this has continued. All our “benchmarks” are continuing to get better, and the better the benchmarks are, the better we can feel about going back to something akin to normal.
Covid isn’t “done” or “over”: we’re still on our way to 100,000 deaths a year (a flu season death rate is 30–60,000). And Covid is never going completely away; it will probably be here for centuries.
But Covid is right now a shadow of its former threatening self.
The science is clear about those for whom Covid is still a serious threat:
— the elderly (we can squabble over the exact number but let’s say 75)