$6 Gas is Here. $7 Gas, Too!

When I filled up one of our cars this weekend I paid over $6/gallon for gas. It was $6.099... for base grade gas (87 octane) at one of the cheapest stations in town. That's the most I've ever paid for gas in the US!

The price was so high it surprised me a second time. When I was checking my credit card app Monday I saw a charge of $113 from a gas station. "WTF? That can't be right!" was my immediate reaction. But then I paused a moment and realized, yeah, that's what a fill-up is going to cost nowadays.

Even worse, it's not just $6 gas that's here, it's $7 gas, too. I paid $6.099/gallon at one of the cheapest stations in town. As I drove around for shopping errands over the weekend I saw that name-brand stations were charging up to $6.999 for premium grade gas (91 octane). Diesel at many stations is already over $7 a gallon. And my town isn't even the most expensive in the area. So for some people $7 gas is already a reality. 😰

Prices shot up a lot last week... and not just here in California. When I was in Arizona the weekend before last, cheap gas was $4.19 when I arrived and over $5 when I left 4 days later!

Tier Tuesday: 5 Things

It's been four weeks since I last did a Tier Tuesday check. In four weeks a lot could change. As I checked my primary source of numerical data, The New York Times's Coronavirus in the U.S., I didn't see a dominant narrative about the latest developments. Instead I observed several smaller stories. So, here are Five Things:

1) The new case rate is actually dropping. After a few weeks of rising ~25% a week the rate of infections has flattened out and actual begun to subside over the past few weeks. Monday's 7-day average of 98,867 is down from a week earlier's 109,105, which was a slight increase from 107,316 a week before that.

2) These case rates are still high. An improvement is good; don't get me wrong. But these case rates are still sadly high. Compare it to where we were around a year ago, when vaccination was becoming widely available to all adults. On June 6, 2021, the 7-day average new case rate was 14,197. The figure from June 6, 2022, two days ago, is 7x that.

3) And the real case rates are even higher. The real difference is even worse than 7x. That's because while a year ago the only way to get tested was to have a clinic do it— which meant the metrics would get reported to county, state, and ultimately federal health authorities— today much testing is done via at-home test kits. Many people who test positive at home never get an "official" test performed. How many cases go uncounted? The test positivity rate (on official, counted tests) over 13% suggests that official numbers represent fewer than half the actual cases. So the new-case rate today could be 14x, 18x, or more vs. a year ago.

4) The hospitalization rate continues to climb, slowly. One way to avoid the underreporting gap in cases is to look at hospitalization trends. The number of patients in hospitals with Covid is continuing upwards. The latest figures are not 14x or even 7x what they were a year ago; but they are still higher, about 25% higher.

5) Mask mandates are coming back as risks climb. Last week Alamada County, a neighboring county in the Bay Area home to 1.7 million residents, announced a mask mandate in most indoor public settings. Example news coverage: KQED article 2 Jun 2022. Arguably many more localities that have reached the CDC "High" risk of community infection should mandate masks, too, but they won't.