[conspire] Omicron, holiday gatherings, upcoming CABAL meeting

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> California's COVID-19 caseload remains 99% Delta, at this writing, with
> cases slightly upticking in what _may_ or may not be the beginning of a
> winter surge.  The Bay Area, however, is still trending downwards.  

Or maybe not _quite_.  One leading _predictor_ of where we'll be in the
near future -- but not to be confused with very tangible, real-world
numbers like number of COVID-19 hospitalisations or COVID-19 ICU beds
occupied -- is the "Current R-effective" conensus estimates for
California as a whole and for each of California's 58 counties, that
can be seen here:  https://calcat.covid19.ca.gov/, and navigate to the
Nowcast screen.

The numbers shown are drawn from six credible models, which are shown on
the by-date graphs, along with composite numbers averaging those six.
What's shown is the (estimated) "R-effective" (R-eff), the "average
number of people each infected person will pass the virus onto and
represents the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading".  Anywhere R-eff is
under 1.0, spread of infection is decreasing.  Anywhere above 1.0, it's
(to that degree) increasing.

The consensus model shows California as a whole at R-eff = 1.09, now, 
after being below 1.0 for basically all of November.  We might be seeing
the effect of Thanksgiving gatherings, there.  

A picklist allows also selecting a specific county for the second R-eff
figure and graph.  Picking San Mateo County shows it, too, estimtated at
R-eff = 1.09.  

All of that is so close to 1.0 as probably not very significant, not
even counting that it's model predictions, not clinical data -- but
predictions of falling infection spread were nice, and we don't quite
have that now.  It _could_ be a winter surge starting, but that's not
well founded.

To see real-world numbers, it's best to go to county dashboards, such as
San Mateo County's hospital data, here:
https://www.smchealth.org/data-dashboard/hospital-data

COVID-19 hospitalisations:  15
COVID-19 ICU hospitalisations:  2

The ICU numbers are stable across the last 12 days; non-ICU (acute care) 
numbers are up slightly.

The dashboards don't say "These are 15 unvaccinated people", or 'These
are 13 unvaccinated people and 2 double-vaxed ones, with both of the ICU
patient unvaxed", but that is statistically likely. 


> Why is the Bay Area doing better than most places?  Yep, vaccination
> rate.

San Mateo County's fully vaxed rate stands at 74.7%, which is pretty
good.