Thanksgiving Sacrifice
For the past three months I've been taking a few minutes most weekends to record our current Covid-19 death toll. Here's a plot of my collected numbers for the US. The Thanksgiving effect is really obvious here. Before Thanksgiving, the US was loosing about 6,000 each week. After Thanksgiving, the US weekly death rate rose by 9,000 to an incredible 15,000 deaths per week. By April 1, 2021, about 12 and a half weeks from now, it looks like our Thanksgiving celebrations will have killed over 100,000 Americans as our death total rises to 600,000. Worse, because of the lag of exposure-death, we have not yet started to see the Christmas sacrifice. One take-away from this horror: What we do really does matter . To all who made a personal and family sacrifice by limiting their travel, visits, and exposure of others during this last Thanksgiving I say this: Thank you! Your personal sacrifice helped prevent the sacrifice of even more American lives.