By now, you may have noticed something: the virus doesn't seem to act the way the various public health measures recommended to us assume it does.
If it did, Florida should be catastrophic: very old population, lots of travel in and out, completely open with no state-imposed occupancy restrictions. And yet right now it's doing better in terms of hospitalizations per million than California, whose lockdown is downright inhuman.
Georgia was supposed to be catastrophic. Not even close. Sweden should certainly be in the top five, or top ten, or at least the top 20 worst places for the virus, yet it isn't.
People's mobility, which you'd think would correspond to more deaths, or "cases," or whatever, corresponds to nothing.
There are theories as to why these outcomes occur, but the standard public-health narrative proceeds as if these mysteries did not exist.
So:
Don't you dare visit people for Thanksgiving, they said.
Thanksgiving was November 26, thirteen days ago. Travel for Thanksgiving occurred 14 to 17 days ago.
Here are the numbers for weekly changes in national COVID hospitalizations, courtesy of Alex Berenson. There was already a spike before Thanksgiving, and it has slowed since:
Nov. 10 - 17: +24%
Nov. 17 - 24: +14%
Nov. 24 - Dec. 1: +12%
Dec. 1 - 8: +6%
As you can see, the most recent week's figure is one-fourth as high as that for the week of November 10.