Delta Is Now the Dominant Coronavirus Variant in the U.S.: Coronavirus Updates
npr.org
npr.org
Where I live, approx. 1/3 people claimed to want to avoid the vaccine a month or two ago. We’re up to maybe 75% vaccination rate, so many changed their minds. It’s hard to focus on other countries when your own citizens are holding out
vaccination is going to limit the rate of growth, and the impact when infected. It may also mutate around the vaccination and previous infection protections. We're going to be living with it possibly forever.
Edit: Arr! This post is a sinking ship! But really, most countries are locking down and getting rid of the virus. Just not at the same time… that’s a shame, because it just moves all around the world in waves. In Australia we eliminated COVID several times, just to catch it from India and the US… over and over.
Yes, we have a few vaccines here. But not available to anyone except medical professionals. Vaccination rate is very low, perhaps the lowest in the world. Yet in between lockdowns and catching COVID from other countries, we live normally. Isolation of 2-3 weeks easily defeats COVID, even if delta strain and hundreds of cases, without vaccination. Global coordinated isolation seems like the safest and fastest way to end the pandemic. It works in Australia.
Plus the delta strain seems to be causing more symptomatic cases(but still very few hospitalizations and deaths) in vaccinated folks than the previous strains. So that's causing more spread.
That said, herd immunity thresholds vary massively. They're much lower in, say, Wyoming, than NYC.
- Approximately 158 million Americans have been vaccinated
If you generously assume no overlap between these populations, that leaves ~56 million pristine hosts. Vax resistance is clustered geographically, so those 56 million are more likely to be near other unvaccinated people. 56 million is a lot of people.
If you assume any meaningful number of people have been vaccinated after being infected, there could quite easily be 100 million or more latent hosts in the US.
(Also vax effectiveness is not 100% so we expect some number of folks to contract the disease after being fully vaccinated.)
Even if you think that Manaus city's study was poorly done, the fact that this is a 2nd study in a 2nd city with similar results adds on to the evidence.
The author list does not seem to match the Manaus city, aside from Ester C Sabino (who was 1st author in the Manaus study, but seems to be a much later author in this newer study). I'm assuming they got Sabino to discuss the other study in the context of this one.
US coronavirus antibody seroprevelance rate was 22.0% as of late April 2021.[1] The data runs about 2 months behind.
(Don't add those directly; there's overlap.)
The 22% figure comes from a CDC national epidemic surveillance program. They take random samples from commercial blood labs, using samples taken for other medical purposes, and test them for antibodies. The test used now can distinguish between people who have had the disease and those vaccinated. So this is a low cost way to track the epidemic.
There's state by state data for both vaccinations and seroprevelance, and it varies a lot by state.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/06/health/israel-pfizer-efficacy...
For the record, ~2% of flu symptomatic illnesses result in hospitalization (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html), so unless you are terrified every winter, this probably shouldn't be considered that high of a risk.
Arguably you did this too: 2% vs 7% don't round down to the same thing: one is 3.5 times higher.
1. I calculated this by taking the cumulative hospitalization rate (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122354/covid-19-us-hosp...) and assuming that 20% of Americans have gotten covid, then taking 7% of that. It’s not perfect but it’s within a factor of 2 of the real risk.
Sorry if this sounds like fear-mongering, it's just caution.
If 36% of vaccinated people get it, they probably aren't wearing masks and are going to spread it very easily to people who may not be vaccinated. Not everybody is unvaccinated by choice, especially depending on the area you live in. Just seems a little premature to open everything back up with a more infectious strain going around.
Even when it rises to the level of noticeability, it is much milder for the vaccinated.
Since Pfizer (and likely Moderna) are less effective vs Delta, it means we need to push our vaccination rates higher to protect our unvaccinated population (who are largely immunocompromised: such as cancer patients).
Does anyone have more information on why it's a bigger issue in the winter? Is it because people spend more time indoors in the winter where spread will be more likely while in the summer people will spend their time outside where spread is less likely?
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/why-do-dozens-diseas...
>Even for well-known seasonal diseases, it’s not clear why they wax and wane during the calendar year. “It’s an absolute swine of a field,” says Andrew Loudon, a chronobiologist at the University of Manchester. Investigating a hypothesis over several seasons can take 2 or 3 years. “Postdocs can only get one experiment done and it can be a career killer,” Loudon says. The field is also plagued by confounding variables. “All kinds of things are seasonal, like Christmas shopping,” says epidemiologist Scott Dowell, who heads vaccine development and surveillance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and in 2001 wrote a widely cited perspective that inspired Martinez’s current study. And it’s easy to be misled by spurious correlations, Dowell says.
I was in NYC for the entirety of 2020 so I'm not trying to minimize here, but the fear mongering and doom and gloom is really starting to get old. If you got the vaccine, resume living normally, wear a mask on public transit (heck wherever you want) but move on. People who decided to not get the vaccine made that choice, if they pay the price... so be it... Move on...
Their only hope of survival in these times is for everyone they meet to be vaccinated: for herd immunity.
Immunocompromised individuals exist. As a society, we're supposed to vaccinate ourselves to protect our most vulnerable.
Long covid is a thing in children too.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
For health reasons that I'm not going to discuss online, my partner has been unable to get the vaccine. The amount of people who have stopped wearing masks in our apartment, at the grocery store, etc. has really started to increase where we live. Knowing that these people are still able to get infected with the delta variant and easily spread it is terrifying. She desperately wants to get the vaccine but can't, so every day is more and more terrifying for her. I have the vaccine but I'm still scared to go out without a mask on because I don't want to get it from somebody who isn't wearing a mask and spread it to her, so I'm not even able to "resume living normally".
I know it might not seem fair to you to put the world on hold for a few people who can't get the vaccine for one reason or another, but you also need to know that it is not always "by choice" and that the price may be people's lives.
What I'm trying to say is that even with 100% vaccination rate, it's not clear that new variants wouldn't spread around the population and continue to infect everyone around us.
Check mate science, move on. Living in fear of the unknown is a fools errand.
This is how you play into the hand of the insane people who think covid was a "government plant" to sow compliance lmao.
That being said, many people are treating it as a political issue, or feel the risk is low enough for them that they don’t need to get vaccinated. Many people have never taken the pandemic seriously, and still don’t.
We need solutions that either inoculate people who are eligible or can convince people to voluntarily get inoculated, because the economic effects of lockdowns and other pandemic controls are far too destructive to apply unequally or over a long period of time. The efficacy of things like lockdowns also goes down over time. If we want these tools to work for future outbreaks and pandemics, we can’t always use them.
I sincerely hope your partner is able to stay safe. I hope that you can find a way through this together. Unfortunately, it’s just extremely difficult to get people to collectively work on this problem.
In a way, news articles like this don’t help. We should really reserve alarms for quantifiable metrics and risks, not hypotheticals. It just adds fuel to the fire for many, and that isn’t helping get people vaccinated faster.
> This is an extremely narrow-minded and potentially harmful view.
One could argue the same of your response.
> I have the vaccine but I'm still scared to go out without a mask on because I don't want to get it from somebody who isn't wearing a mask and spread it to her, so I'm not even able to "resume living normally".
Please explain how this is my problem or why I should be concerned for your irrational fear. This is a statement that appears to both highly entitled and rooted in emotion - not reason or evidence.
I wish the best for you and your wife. To be clear, I'm not a political person and don't intend any of my arguments here to be perceived as such.
Put simply, it's not irrational.
If you're looking for a solution, that's one potential option. However, emotionally charged arguments tend to lack any trace of an actual solution. Imparting the challenges of your life on others unfortunately probably isn't going to have effective outcomes.
I'm going to sleep now.
My partner and I also enjoy living, it's just a huge bummer that you seem to be of a mindset that even if your actions negatively affect others you don't seem to care. As somebody else said, this is not an irrational fear in any way (it comes from an understanding that has been reached through research and data) and calling it that shows your complete lack of empathy.
There is no such thing as being "not a political person". All of your actions have consequences, even if those consequences affect people you don't know.
Unless you're wearing a respirator, your mask probably isn't that effective at stopping you from getting infected, especially with more contagious variants. This is a bit hand-wavy, but you can see from infection data just how relatively ineffective masks are compared to vaccines; SF was heavily masked last summer, and despite lots of closures, daily cases were still significantly higher (and growing) a year ago compared to today. With the caveat that it depends a lot on where you are, you're safer without a mask and the ~50% immunity the average US community has than with a mask any time in the past year.
> I know it might not seem fair to you to put the world on hold...the price may be people's lives.
Putting the world on hold for another 9 months also takes away lives in a less obvious way.
I do get where you're coming from, it makes sense, and it's a shitty situation.
Like yeah, I understand that things should go back to normal. We don't have to be assholes about it though.
As for me, I'm fully vaccinated and I only wear my mask to the grocery store, figuring that's where everybody has to go to get food including those who through no fault of their own aren't able to get vaccinated. Otherwise I'm pretty much "back to normal" too (well, almost - I see no reason to go to restaurants and movies anymore, there's something that changed during the lockdown).
Why overloading our medical facilities again somehow going to level out some imaginary part of the population you think needs to magically die?
(R0 for Delta is 5 to 8 -- and our vaccine is only 64% protective against infections making the 80% herd immunity threshold impossible to reach).
The problem isn't having a vaccine available that's protective enough... it's getting enough holdouts to actually take it before another mutated variant takes over.
If it can keep mutating it seems a healthy life style will protect you more universally than targetted vaccines that are longer relevant.
(Down votes coming for having a critical thought that doesn't support the orthodoxy)
It feels like, especially with your addition in parentheses, that your goal here is simply to anger people.
No known variant incl. delta shows full antigenic escape, and we have plenty of evidence of the protective benefit of vaccination in patient outcomes. Coronaviruses are slow-evolving RNA viruses (due to their proofreading enzymatic activity, single strand, etc.), and though we are certainly seeing a period of new host adaptation, SARS-COV-2 is almost certainly not going to be like H1N1 influenza.
That's the entire count of reasonably directly attributable deaths.
When you administer a vaccine to hundreds of millions of people, you will statistically expect some numbers of deaths to occur shortly after administration just by chance. Each such case then requires careful investigation to determine if there was a particular immune-linked syndrome that could be explained by a side-effect of vaccination.
In fact, most deaths argued to be due to the vaccines are frail, elderly patients (80+) in long term care facilities. The most concerning side-effect of the RNA vaccines are extremely rare cases of myocarditis and pericarditis seen in young people which are est. ~12 cases per million - we're talking ~500 total reports (not deaths) in the US. Contrast this with the 15,000 child hospitalizations and ~300 child deaths due to covid.