Why are US Covid cases falling?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cases of Covid 19 began to soar in the US in the autumn. By early January there were around 300,000 new cases a day. But since then the numbers have fallen steeply. What caused this dramatic drop? From herd immunity to the weather, Tim Harford explores some of the theories with Derek Thompson of The Atlantic magazine and Professor Jennifer Dowd, deputy director of the Lever Hume Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a program that explores |
| 0:05.3 | the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford. |
| 0:09.2 | The US has reached an awful milestone. |
| 0:12.2 | The number of people who've died with Covid-19 has surpassed 500,000. |
| 0:18.1 | In the autumn, cases soared. |
| 0:20.2 | At the beginning of January, the US was reporting around 300,000 new cases a day. |
| 0:28.5 | The numbers were going up and up and then they stopped. |
| 0:35.0 | And they started to fall, not just by a little, but by a lot. |
| 0:39.8 | At the time of recording, the US is reporting around 70,000 new cases a day, a dramatic fall |
| 0:47.3 | from the 300,000 at the beginning of the year. |
| 0:50.9 | So why the steep fall? |
| 0:53.4 | It's a bit of a mystery because just one month ago, the CDC published the |
| 0:58.4 | results of about 20 different pandemic forecasting models. |
| 1:03.0 | This is Derek Thompson, staff writer at the Atlantic magazine. |
| 1:07.3 | They all predicted that Covid cases would keep growing into March. |
| 1:10.9 | They were completely wrong. |
| 1:12.0 | And instead, we saw basically everything start to fall off the cliff in January. |
| 1:15.8 | Today, we're looking at one question. |
| 1:21.9 | Why? |
| 1:22.9 | There have been a number of hypotheses that have been suggested. |
| 1:26.3 | Ideas ranging from herd immunity to vaccinations to explore them in detail were joined by Derek |
| 1:32.2 | Thompson, whom you heard a moment ago and also by Jennifer Dowd. |
... |
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