Winter Solstice is here, now bring back the sun!

Today is December 21, the Winter Solstice and shortest day of the year for many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Historically, many cultures have marked the Winter Solstice for centuries, if not millennia. Traditions generally center around life, death, and rebirth. That makes sense as the day is an inflection point when the sun's time in the sky is at an ebb. Following this the days get longer again.

I don't attach spiritual significance to this scientific fact but I'm still going to say Yay! I'm happy to be slowly moving away from these short, cold days where it's dark when my workday alarm rings in the morning and dark again before my workday ends. Granted, at 37.4° N latitude I don't have the worst of it. My shortest day is still 9.5 hours. Helsinki, Finland, just north of 60°, has anemic days with just under 6 hours of daylight at this time of year.

BTW a good explainer on how the tilt of the earth's axis affects the length of days, and things like that, is science writer Deborah Byrd's article EarthSky.org.

"It's not like March 2020." No, it's WORSE!

"It's not like March 2020," I've been seeing in numerous headlines about Coronavirus over the past 24 hours. The president even said it in a speech today. The point of the comparison is to reassure the public that 1) the risks of Coronavirus today aren't as bad as they were in March 2020, and that therefore 2) drastic measure such as shutdowns are unwarranted. But here's the thing: by at least one important, evidence based measure the risks are clearly worse.

A key metric I follow, and which I frequently reference in this blog when I write about Coronavirus trends, is the average daily new case rate. This best reflects the answer to the question, "What are my chances of being exposed to Coronavirus?" The more people who have recent cases, the greater the chance you'll be exposed to someone who's contagious. Here's how that looks, now vs. then:



I created the graphic above from The New York Times's "Coronavirus in the U.S." page (retrieved 21 Dec 2021) with callouts to compare now vs. then. At the end of March 2020, the worst part of that month, the daily average was 19,217. Today the daily average is 157,412. That's more than 8 times as many new cases. By this objective measure, "This is not March 2020"; it's WAY WORSE!

Now, not everything is worse today. A big positive is that we've got the vaccine in wide availability. More than 2/3 of everyone in the U.S. has gotten vaccinated. I've gotten vaccinated and gotten a booster, too.

The problem is that the vaccine is not a magic bullet. It gives only about 4x protection vs. the Omicron strain (meaning vaccinated people are 4x less likely than un-vaccinated to test positive for it) according to preliminary data being reported this week. 4x protection but 8x higher exposure.... Those are not favorable numbers!