Sunday was a SIX Green Arrow Day.

Maybe, Maybe Not

Good Morning,

Maybe, or maybe not, was there a steep drop in new cases last week—the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Unfortunately, there is a lag between actual events, such as recent cases, and how that data flows into the “reported” categories. The information for the week is quite favorable, but the long weekend and the processing of last week’s information may be more responsible for this than anything else (see graph, purple circle).

Thus far in November, 195 million Americans have received their complete regimen of vaccinations, or 59%, with another 37 million in the queue to finish their requirement. Over the past several weeks, we averaged about 1.2 million added to the fully vaccinated category; only 860,000 completed their vaccinations last week. Interesting to note is that the queue keeps increasing, yet the new fully vaccinated remains relatively constant. We suspect that means a growing number of individuals are stopping after one shot and not wanting to complete their fully vaccinated requirement. Go figure.

Slowly we are approaching the Herd Immunity Factor (HIF), the combination of those that have acquired natural immunity or through vaccination. Currently, we are about at the 77th percentile of HIF. The 195 million vaccinated plus those that had the virus and recovered and those “officially recovered” 19 million, plus those counted as a new case but yet to be classified as closed, 43 million is the HIF. That equates to 77% of our population. We believe the HIF is at least 80%. That means we will probably not see another drop in case levels until HIF is reached.