The UK’s delta surge is collapsing
nymag.com
nymag.com
It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed themselves to infection most during the pandemic, through disdain for social distancing, mask-wearing, etc. In other words those still unvaccinated in Western countries with easy access to vaccines have a pretty good chance of having been infected by now.
Adding those two populations together would seem to indicate that most Western populations are already at herd immunity by this point, which would mean that these surges can be reasonably expected to become smaller and smaller. Unless of course some totally new variant capable of evading all existing vaccines and immunity from prior infection emerges.
It wouldn't surprise me if the UK's cases are now dropping because they reached that threshold, but I doubt the US is there now. Probably Delta will blow through literally all the remaining unvaccinated people and that'll be the last surge, at least unless we get a vaccine-resistant strain.
The current dip in the UK is trending toward the former. But it's further complicated by the fact that levels of immunity in the population will continue to oscillate up and down. (Nevermind that once schools open in September, 20% of the population with relatively sparse vaccination will be mixing in large cohorts).
Another factor in herd immunity is vaccine efficacy - which is somewhere between 86% and 95% for the mRNA vaccines (and will continue to change). A herd immunity threshold of 90% presupposes a vaccine with 100% efficacy - when your vaccines are not that effective (not to mention, losing effectiveness over time) it bumps the threshold even higher.
Right now, much of the population has some level of "sterilising immunity" from the first round of vaccines and previous infection (i.e. having enough circulating antibodies to potentially block symptomatic infection and transmission). But everything we know about existing respiratory viruses (and indications so far this year) suggest antibodies will wane.
Of course, indications are most people will come away with robust cell-based immunity. (Those plucky T-cells and B-cells). But eradication for the UK looks *very* close to impossible given the near-total-abandonment of public health measures recently.
Not necessarily the case. Infections with HCoV-229E produces durable immunity and reinfection is due to antigenic drift:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.17.423313v1
That it at odds with prior studies that found ~12 month reinfections with coronaviruses, but it is with considerably better methodology.
And it is simultaneously: not clear that vaccines produce sterilizing immunity, not clear it is necessary to do that at all, and not clear if how much measurements of NAbs correlates with sterilizing immunity.
I can tell you a story about how delta reaches 90-100% thresholds of herd immunity in this wave and burns itself out and we don't see it much again for 3-5 years in countries like the US/UK. Or I can tell you a story about how it keeps coming back every year with 2 or 3 waves. Anyone who tells you they know which of those outcomes must be correct probably knows a lot less about virology than they think they do (even if they have a degree). I'm reasonably hopeful its the former, but I never predicted delta and thought we'd be virus-free this summer and was wrong.
Even in the worst case though the vaccinated/recovered are never going back to 2019 levels of susceptibility to severe outcomes, so we're looking at a steady drip-drip-drip of people killing themselves to avoid vaccination up until we get bored with that and they pretty much disappear (that's where T-cells and B-cells and cross reactive partial immunity to all future variants comes in).
We could look at the flu for clues, in that case every year will have one or more variants that are the most prominent.
I'd argue that in the age category with the most infected (10-29 years old) in the UK, that these people are not killing themselves due to their young age.
And the elderly have already gotten the vaccine and are thus up to eight times more likely to not get infected.
I don't support the recent abandonment of restrictions, but could that policy, followed up by stricter restrictions in a few months time actually be helpful for eradication? Eradication is likely a hopeless prospect in the UK anyway, because there is no political will for closing the borders. But it's interesting to conjecture.
Didn't the UK have another lockdown for this wave too?
Herd-masking seemed like a no-brainer from the beginning. It will be really hard to go back to that in the US after the CDC giving the all clear to go maskless.
...which will happen promptly. The selection pressures are perfect. You already have a variant with vaccine breakthrough, circulating in a partially vaccinated population.
So the question is, is the virus now in a local minima where it is highly adapted for spread (ie big increase in R0 from ‘original’ virus) and are those selective pressures in a situation where the virus can’t jump into a full immunity escape mode without climbing down off mount improbable and taking another face?
My bet would be that the selective pressures may continue to drive fitness for reproduction, but won’t lead to immunity escape because spike is too conserved
The more optimized the covid spike becomes, the harder it is to get better. What frightens me are polymerase mutations.
[0] Darwinian Evolution Can Follow Only Very Few Mutational Paths to Fitter Proteins https://science.sciencemag.org/content/312/5770/111
[1] The rate of compensatory mutation in the DNA bacteriophage phiX174https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15911582/
So the important question is: should "we" take the bet on that immunity escape? Or should we not take that chance?
My opinion is that we should act decisively to avoid the bet.... but the UK government clearly feels lucky.
History is mixed here, but most of the mandatory vaccines seem to be extremely effective and to work well for at least decades.
60% (Vaccinated + Previously Infected)
Then you realize that a transmission rate among the timid in ShyFleetersLand and the compulsive in LetsHugLand cannot be the same. Then you realize that that very average number needs explanations of the underlying model to be meaningful - it comes from societal behaviour not just from intrinsic viral properties.
I think you're right, but that will still happen over years in multiple waves. Barring some sudden uptick in people changing their mind about vaccination.
Given the enormous US Covid outbreak, the US is likely not far away. We're at 70% adult vaccination and had a minimum of 100 million prior Covid infections. Also throw in tens of millions of people that likely have natural immunity to Covid.
The biggest question with Delta is going to be the matter of repeat infections and how long the vaccines, the vaccines + prior infections, and prior infections (without vaccination) all hold up against it. To say nothing of what variations will follow next after Delta. Is there actually herd immunity to be found with Delta, or will people just keep getting variations of Covid from here forward. I don't believe there will be herd immunity for any nations, there will just be far lower mortality rates due to prior virus exposure and the vaccines. Some non-trivial % of the vaccinated population will continue to get Covid. If there was a chance to squash Covid with the early strain via herd immunity, those days are very long gone.
The great lie still being persisted for the benefit of the agitated public, is that Covid is going to go away courtesy of vaccinations. The authorities have pitched that to the public from the early days of the vaccines to try to max out the vaccination rates. Do this and Covid goes away. The vaccines are never going to stop Covid, they're going to continue to dramatically reduce the mortality rates (which is critical, however the public still doesn't widely grasp the reality of the forever Covid future yet).
If it becomes century-long endemic in the population, kids are exposed to it, likely creating a productive exposure-related immune reaction until they're old enough to get an mRNA vaccine.
What will be interesting to find out in the near future, is if high vaccination rates + prior infections reduce Covid deaths below, say, 50k people in the US every year, or whether we're forever stuck with a sizable population killer no matter what (short of implementing elaborate forever cultural systems of lockdown; as in, those counter measures will have to become ingrained deeply into the culture, accepted and automatic). The next decade is going to be very weird and interesting on that front.
Good guess. As of today, that's the exact number:
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-08-02/...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...
...to be quite interesting for covid-19 vaccination information. For example, the state with the lowest rate of at-least-one-dose vaccinations for people 65 and up is West Virginia, at 83.1%. Most states are 90+% or better for that age group.
A very large number of those adults also aren't going to need two doses to reach high levels of protection (against severe outcomes), due to prior infections. One mRNA vaccine dose + prior infection will get you there.
Combined with the recent surge in vaccinations due to Delta concerns, the US will probably see the same drop-off that Britain has by late August - early September.
That is (1) outrageously hyperbolized and (2) completely wrong. Delta wasn't known to have this level of transmissibility until the last three weeks. People, experts, doctors, "authorities", whatever, you want to label them 100% believed sincerely that we were on a path to the elimination of the outbreak.
Cut the bullshit, basically. Yeah, yeah, I know it's HN and everyone wants to think they're smarter than everyone else. But you aren't. You're retconning brand new science to make prior understanding into a "big lie". That's really awful.
Delta was formerly known as the India(n) variant. We've known it had high transmissibility since April or May.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
If you're referencing the CDC's case study from Provincetown, I think it's important to point out that the R value cited is the R value during Bear Week, not on average.
From wiki: "R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population."
And learned the difference with Rt today (which some others are quoting, eg for Alberta), is that Rt is computed, while R0 is a guess based on a model, to try to normalize Rt so that it is more comparable over time and place. So I thought that was cool!
:) Many of us have felt something along those lines since the early times.
But e.g. the viral load for said variant was reported as _1000x_ Wuhan weeks ago, value changed to _3x_ days ago.
I read the emergence of Tinnitus after COVID-19 weeks ago at _67%_, today at _0.shmbrmbsomething_.
We are flooded in bad numbers. (And of course, that R0 is also circumstantial, vs the examples above...)
COVID-19 herd immunity? It's not going to happen, so what next?
https://theconversation.com/covid-19-herd-immunity-its-not-g...
> we would need to get close to 84% of the global population developing protection against infection (in the absence of non-pharmacological interventions) in as brief a period of time as possible
(...also, there, you find «the reproductive rate [...] is probably closer to six rather than three»)
They estimated that as of June 14, 89.8% of the population would test positive for antibodies.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Indeed, even with Delta’s terrifying R-value, this seems like enough to suppress the virus.
Some easy-to-grab stats from Canada's worst covid province which is dealing with a Delta wave:
Alberta provincewide: 1.48 (1.38-1.59)
Edmonton Zone: 1.37 (1.15-1.61)
Calgary Zone: 1.50 (1.37-1.64)
Rest of Alberta: 1.48 (1.26-1.73)
Edit: later learned the parent is talking about R0 and you are talking about Rt, so those numbers are not directly comparable anyways.
In practice, of course, people respond to news about Covid waves and that contributes to the wave-like dynamics. Furthermore, new variants of the virus will be able to reach people that were "cautious enough" for a previous variant. That alone would also give you wave-like dynamics, basically every new variant would affect increasingly harder to reach people.
Anyway, the point is, seeing these waves is super natural and expected and we can't deduce anything about population-level immunity from them without looking really really closely.
Sure, _maybe_.
> [...] would seem to indicate that most Western populations are already at herd imnmunity by this point
Given that infections are still rising pretty hard, what indicates to you that we are _at_ this point, and not, say, 6 months out?
That's assuming that nobody who got covid later got vaccinated (or got it before the vaccine kicked in). That seems like a very unrealistic assumption to me. On the other side, there are probably a lot more cases than are reported.
You're right that it almost certainly matters for heard immunity, but i think you need a much more complex model to know how much of an effect it has.
CDC estimated that 1/4 covid infections had an associated positive test. I did the same kind of napkin math you're referring too for Floridia a few months back and they'd could have been at 80% of the population with some level of immunity.
But napkin math probably isn't a good way to run a pandemic response. Just like herd immunity doesn't really matter at an individual level.
[0]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...
Come on, this is silly. We haven't learned nothing over the last year. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
It's also worth noting that's a study of ~200 people. Given then times we're in it's an excellent sign and possible reason for cautious optimism and I'm sure a larger scale study is much harder to pull off in the midst of the pandemic.
That said, I have yet to see a study on the rate of reinfection of any of the variants against people who had already been infected with the initial strain, and how well that is survived, etc.
I was under the impression viruses became less lethal because if they became more, they'd kill off their hosts and be less likely to spread.
There's a chance you get some super virus that becomes both more transmissible and lethal, but that is very rare (from what I can see).
Only if the lethality is negatively impacting their fitness. If it can spread to another host quickly, who cares if the previous host dies. There's no selective pressure against it.
Which is why Delta is scary. Not just because of the higher viral load, but new strains could be more lethal and still not be selected against.
And let’s not forget about Mareks disease, where a non-sterilizing vaccine is thought to have contributed to a massive increase in virulence, killing nearly 100% of unvaccinated chickens now vs causing mild disease decades ago.
With a different presentation of disease where symptoms and spread occur concurrently then there would be a pressure on the virus selecting for strains that arent so lethal a carrier has no chance to spread. In covid’s case, that pressure doesn’t exist as far as i can see?
There are supposedly over 200 different viruses that can cause the common cold (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/underst...). So it's quite possible for immunity to any individual strain to last a very long time and still get multiple colds per year.
> Usually viruses become more transmissible and less lethal in response to rational behavior in their hosts--but humans are proving we're not rational.
Our own "rationality" doesn't matter much, if a virus leaves you bed-ridden or dead, that makes it very hard for you spread it regardless of your choices. The fact that we have so many different viruses which essentially cause more or less the same "common cold" proves that there is very strong evolutionary pressure for a virus to behave this way.
All viruses get less lethal as time goes on, not stronger, despite all the fear porn that has been indoctrinated into the public over the last year and a half.
This isn't true. Given certain assumptions, it's true on average, but those assumptions don't apply in this case.
For a specific example the Spanish Flu hit harder later on.
Wrong. It's generally the case, because a virus that keeps its host walking around will tend to infect more people than a virus that sends them straight to the morgue.
SARS-Cov-2 is unusual in that it's asymptomatic infectious period is really quite long. It's straight-to-morgue capabilities could become much more prevalent with hitting its infectivity too badly.
Smallpox.
We've faced strict lockdowns and limited access to vaccines to which makes us a ticking time bomb if we were to let current cases go rampant.
Separately, the physical social graph is not uniform, but complex. There can easily be narrower channels that have a lower probability of conducting infection. Thus, the spread will slow after the easy routes have been exploited.
This argument was made many, many times over the past year and a half by people insisting that <their area has hit herd immunity and everything is fine and we can fully re-open>.
Inevitably, like clockwork, the wave of COVID that would follow would dwarf the previous one.
The only thing that has broken this pattern has been mass vaccinations. It seems that high rate of antibody sero-prevalence in the population only protects you from COVID on paper.
I anecdotally am finding this to be the case
We don't know how much, though. There are cases in which vaccine performs better than a natural infection, there are cases in which the vaccine performs worse than natural infection. Without time for a study, it's impossible to know where we lie with Covid.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/new-uk-challenge-trial-stud...
I have no clue. I hope it works out well.
No, actually; the actual infection sometimes misfires, leaving dud spike proteins outside the cells. If the immune system finds those first, it'll attack the dud spike proteins instead of the still-functional spike proteins, attacking all the viruses that failed to get into the cells instead of all the viruses that might succeed. The mRNA vaccine doesn't produce real, active viruses, so it doesn't have this problem.
> Taking the line of reasoning where we assume the worst case scenario until proven otherwise, would it be reasonable to assume long term medical issues from the vaccinations?
Assuming the worst-case scenario until proven otherwise doesn't work like that. You have to look at the entire range of uncertainty, and choose the worst-case scenario for each question.
Example: you want to know, worst-case, how many people will die from car crashes on a road in a year, so you assume that the cars involved in collisions are travelling at the fastest recorded speeds on that road (or in the 90th percentile of speeds on similar roads, or something). But if you want to know, worst-case, how long it'll take to travel the road, you should assume there'll be loads of traffic jams, or the road will be closed.
So here's a worst-case scenario if people don't get vaccinated, bounded by my amateur knowledge of epidemiology: there's a large enough infected population passing the disease around for a really deadly, fast-spreading variant to emerge, and its antigens are different enough from normal that everyone currently vaccinated is susceptible, hundreds of millions of people die, and COVID becomes a seasonal (but much more deadly) illness, killing hundreds of millions again every few years until it reaches an equilibrium of sorts. (A real epidemiologist would know more, which would probably lead to a less apocalyptic worst-case scenario prediction – but it might lead to an even worse one.)
Here's a worst-case scenario if people do get vaccinated: everyone is vaccinated, COVID-19 starts going away, then a month later, it turns out that the vaccines – and real COVID-19 infections (there's no mechanism in the vaccines that isn't also in SARS-CoV-2, excluding the needle / delivery mechanism) cause some complicated, heretofore-unknown-to-science time-delay mechanism that causes a severe allergy or autoimmune condition. Thousands die before we identify the problem, and tens of thousands die before our politicians get their acts together and authorise the mass distribution of anti-allergy / immunosuppressant medication (which we already have manufacturing plants and distribution networks for). We live with the aftermath, but getting infected would've been just as bad.
This second scenario is a lot less realistic than the global apocalypse one, because I had to pull side effects out of my ass. If the vaccines caused chronic fatigue syndrome, which is the only COVID-19-induced disorder caused by a mechanism that the vaccines could share (because we don't know what causes it), it would've started happening already. But it hasn't. Assuming some arbitrary thing we have a fair bit of evidence against is not how you do worst-case scenarios, and it certainly shouldn't be how you do actual planning.
The second point, your worst case scenario doesn't even address the worst concerns of people who don't want to take the vaccine. They don't trust that spike proteins are the only things in the vaccine. The worst case scenario is not that the vaccine acts like the virus but that it acts different than the virus. And then you get conspiracy stuff like new world order types deliberately introducing things to the vaccine that will make it harder to have kids or stuff. And unfortunately our trusted organizations telling white lies to the public to elicit the behavior they want hasn't helped this trust issue.
But this is all moot for two reasons. First, because someone actually did a study and found that the immune response from infection was ~10 times stronger than from the vaccines[0]. Second, because we've already selected for a virus that is highly contagious and can infect vaccinated people, and will thus continue to be selected to specifically infect vaccinated people since most potential hosts are vaccinated at this point.
In summary, we might have to all be infected, nearly all at once, for this to be over, or just get lucky and the dominant strains will be attenuated to the point where they aren't a major problem.
[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.29.454333v1
It seems to me the worst case scenario is always applied when looking at things like natural immunity from prior infection, long covid, etc
If you model Sars-Cov-2 after Sars-Cov-1 or MERS then you would be lead to believe natural immunity lasts around 5+ years.
Where is worst case scenario not applied? Anything to do with vaccines. We're not even allowed to question it.
We are extremely conservative on one side of the coin, but not the other. Why?
How do you figure that last part?
If we're talking worst-case scenarios from mass vaccination I would think you would need to put Marek's or ADE type outcomes on the table.
IFR: 0.15 = 613000 * 1 / 0.0015 = 408 million infections (124% population)
IFR: 0.3 = 613000 * 1 / 0.003 = 204 million infections (62% population)
IFR: 0.6 = 613000 * 1 / 0.006 = 102 million infections (31% population)
So in case of the lower IFR would implicate there must be many reinfections. And those reinfections are still deadly. It would imply immunity isn't long-lasting. So best to keep routinely boosting your immunity through vaccines. This would probably be the least favorable scenario.
In the case of the higher IFR would implicate there's still some herd immunity to go. It also implicates infections are more deadly. So better boost herd immunity by getting the vaccine. This would actually be the more favorable scenario if we're going to be able to beat Covid.
Disease (as reflected by hospital admissions) and death are what we care about. And those numbers are continuing to trend in the right direction.
The US media is just addicted to fear at this point. With a more boring/traditional president in the office and the covid panic waning, there is a news vacuum. And the media is trying to fill that vacuum with the delta variant. But you can calm your nerves just looking at the data yourself and not reading anything the media has to say.
I don't disagree that the media is fear-mongering for clicks (see inaccurate reporting of CDC report) but in this scenario, there's something actually happening here.
because those people dont want to take the vaccines?
How many people are we talking about?
It’s unbecoming.
You should care about the number of cases because each case is a potential for a new mutation that could be the one that bypasses vaccines or becomes more deadly or …use your imagination.
Nobody cares about controlling you, and if they did they wouldn’t use facts covid they would just use tanks.
This is a really great way to cause revolt. Why do you think China retains such an iron grip over information? It’s how you control a large population.
From my experience it can take a month or two until the plug is pulled, a lot of people who are discharged to LTACs also don't make it but it takes a bit
"Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
Frankly we don't really know how bad the long term effects will be for even those with "mild" illness.
They were the ones who initially published Andrew Wakefield's now-discredited research [1] linking the MMR vaccine to autism. This research and the media attention it garnered massively undermined public trust in vaccines in both the UK and US.
It took them over a decade to officially retract the article.
Maybe you think things have changed (and indeed: I think vaccinations have changed the pattern of cases -> hospitalizations -> death). But ultimately: cases give us a glimpse of what is to come 3 or 4 weeks earlier.
And lo-and-behold, the Florida hospitalization counts are now kicking up dramatically. Good thing we got the news out weeks ago about Delta, so that public opinion can start changing (and now people are beginning to get vaccinated, which should lessen the number of hospitalizations).
Similarly: UK hospitalizations are in fact dropping now!! (coinciding with the drop in case counts 3 or 4 weeks earlier). So even in highly vaccinated countries like UK, case# remains our best predictor for hospitalization counts.
---------------
USA is too late however: we let up on our vaccinations and this surge is going to catch a lot of us by surprise. Hospitals are filling up again.
The vaccinations are coming in too late to stop this current surge (July / August timeframe). But the vaccinations will help us prevent a winter surge.
I just don't think this "collapse" is the case.
My gut feel is that everyone has stopped doing lateral flow tests and reporting those tests: noone wants to be isolating now the summer holidays have started, and many people are now ignoring track and trace because they're scared of the possible "pingdemic". I know many people who have stopped scanning in to venues. I reckon many suspect they may have Delta but because the holidays have started and they've been cut loose from gov mandates of mask wearing etc, that the "crowd responsibility" factor has almost totally dissipated.
There may be evidence otherwise but I suspect actual figures are far higher than is being reported.
Okay that's easy to check: data should show a reduction in positive tests roughly on par with the reduction in number of tests.
Recent peak value of tests per day was 16.42 per 1000 citizens on Jul 17th. At that time there were 630.57 positive test results per million citizens.
On July 28th (latest data) tests declined to 13.46 and positive cases to 443.45. That's 18% fewer tests and 30% fewer positive cases, ballpark twice as much.
I don't think your gut is telling you the full story.
All values are 7-day rolling averages to avoid weekday spikes or anything. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... (use the selector to switch between tests, positive cases, or other metrics)
I believe this Delta collapse. It's exactly what you'd expect given our pace of vaccinations.
You're right though that the numbers somewhat suggest that we're managing to beat the Delta variant. Is it due to vaccinations? The vaccination rate has been slowing for months now, yet the UK still had that spike. The difference in people that decided to get vaccinated between early June (start of positive cases spike) and July 21st (when the decrease set in) is 9%. (from 59% to 68%). It doesn't seem to me that a few percent more vaccinations explains everything. A percentage in the upper 60s, for first vaccinations no less (not even a full vaccination), should not be enough to beat Delta from what I heard about the R0.
(Data source is the same OWID link, you can configure it to show vaccination data.)
The reason I say this is that we have a relatively small population of unvaccinated people, and so with the high R0 of Delta, you'd expect it to rip through these unvaccinated pockets quickly and burn out, which is what we're seeing.
I'd expect a few more Delta mini-waves similar to this in the coming months.
a couple of q’s thou:
1. where do you report lateral flow tests? i do mine at home every day as my work sent out boxes of them.
2. if a lateral flow is positive, aren’t you supposed to do another and then a pcr test?
https://www.gov.uk/report-covid19-result
> if a lateral flow is positive...
I imagine that that report result site will refer you for a PCR test, although thankfully I've never personally been in that position.
Do you have a link to their current stats? I found this page[1] but it's not very accessible, not sure this is what you mean.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
This data goes into modelling for how the government should make decisions about easing lockdowns etc. The UK has some of the best genomic sequencing in the world which is why we are able to identify variants so quickly.
It's just a shame it took the government 1 year to get ready and lied to us in the meantime.
My sister/ husband and neice (uk based) are currently being tested once a month since the outbreak (mid 2020 ish) and they where told that they was picked at random,
All of them have had covid - and probably would not have been discovered without this testing - since all their cases have been asymptomatic
I can’t provide a citation but largely these were abandoned because they were influence by a couple factors
* participation was obviously still voluntary and largely mirrored the same trends you describe
* the data was not short term actionable and took up testing infrastructure at the time
* it was dangerous - I.e., public health workers were threatened, assaulted, and in at least one case shot at.
Is that where this data comes from?
I'm not sure it is. I think it's separate sampling.
If you stare at the government's site https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ hospital admissions seem to have levelled off, and maybe deaths are levelling off but it's too early to be sure.
People get infected (and begin testing positive) first, then some of them get sick (a few more will seek a test and be positive) and then some of those seek hospital admission or call for advice and the advice for their symptoms is "get to hospital" and almost all of the people who eventually die get admitted to hospital first, in some cases dying after weeks of attempted care.
I think there's room for some pessimism without going so far as your parent poster, cases may be down but not as much as it seems. Lots of people seem to have gone off around the country on holiday which seems crazy to me, but clearly didn't make things much worse. People can choose not to seek a test while they're alive, but corpses have no say in what the post mortem data says.
But hospital admissions usually lag behind the number of infections. If in a week or two admissions are still going up while the number of new infections drops, then this theory may be correct.
Notably, the most recent ONS samples demonstrated a sharp rise in cases. The suggestion is that cases are actually surging, but most are now either asymptomatic or at least very mild, and thus not reported.
I guess we'll find out shortly whether that's the case.
That data should show the Delta variant surge as the data comes in.
I still can't find a useful number for people with antibodies prevalent because either infected or vaccinated, although that is apparently tested.
Most recent summary: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Most recent data: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Methods: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
OP was not accurately representing the facts.
Because people tend to continue to test positive for a reasonable period of time after they are first infected, this should be a lagging indicator of any peak in new infections having occurred.
In the last week, we've passed the UK in number of fully vaccinated people, but that's going to be slowing down as we start running of people who got their first dose during the big surge in shots here. Unfortunately, at 64% of the total population getting a first dose, the steep straight line in first doses suddenly curved to a much shallower straight line, to a rate similar to the current UK and US ones.
I find the Our World In Data Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) data (https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus) very interesting.
It doesn't help that Alberta, our country's Texas, has decided to fully open everything and get rid of their requirements. Starting 2 weeks from now, you won't even have to self-isolate if you test positive for COVID-19.
This is a loaded question, but since covid is and will be endemic, when do we get on with our lives and start facing the mountains of other public health issues? It seems like our vaccination effort was extremely successful and had an amazing effect and there isn’t likely to be any radical new intervention for years to come.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that -- I think the number of "people who want protection but can't get it" will be uncomfortably large -- but this is my guess of when society as a whole will decide to move on.
Honestly, I think this means the future looks like the present, but more so. The places that will be hit the hardest will be more working class and in places that under invest in health and welfare. That's already the current trend, certainly in the US -- look at where medicaid expansion following the ACA has and hasn't happened, for instance, and who has access to decent health care and who doesn't. In some ways I think we're lurching back to previous centuries, where diseases like cholera, dysentry, typhus, etc were endemic, and could certainly affect the wealthy and professional classes, but were primarily scourges of the working class.
Children are at exceptionally low risk from Covid. It's time to stop with fear, uncertainty and doubt, and deal with facts.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01897-w
In the US, 340 children under 17 have died from Covid. Total. During the same period, 187 have died from the flu, and over 51,000 children have died from all causes:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...
The reason the vaccines aren't being approved for children is that there is compelling evidence that children are at greater risk from the vaccines than the virus. This is why (for example) approval for vaccination of children and teenagers is split across Europe, and the UK has restricted access to only children with known vulnerabilities:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-19/u-k-to-gi...
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/european-countries...
> At that point the majority of those who actively want protection will be able to get it.
This is less about what the children want, and more about anxious adults want, and that is unconscionable. Kids are largely at the mercy of their parents, so it's essential that the regulatory bodies tread carefully on this issue. We don't need kids to be vaccinated to reduce Covid to a manageable seasonal illness on par with the flu.
> The studies did not evaluate rates of less-severe illness or debilitating ‘long COVID’ symptoms that can linger months after the acute phase of the infection has past. “The low rate of severe acute disease is important news, but this does not have to mean that COVID does not matter to children,” says paediatrician Danilo Buonsenso at the Gemelli University Hospital in Rome. “Please, let’s keep attention — as much as is feasible — on immunization.”
Death is not the only bad outcome to be avoided.
> The reason the vaccines aren't being approved for children is that there is compelling evidence that children are at greater risk from the vaccines than the virus.
A Nature article [0] says:
> Most of those affected have recovered, and the data suggest that the risk of these conditions is “extremely low”, says paediatrician David Pace at the University of Malta in Msida — about 67 cases per million second doses in adolescent males aged 12–17, and 9 per million in adolescent females in the same age group.
There are ~48 million kids under 12 in the US. Assuming they are evenly split between male and female, that would mean 1,824 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis if 100% of them were vaccinated. Given that nowhere near 100% of children have been exposed to COVID and yet 340 have died, I don't see clear evidence here that the vaccine is more risky than not being vaccinated.
Low risk of death, yes. But still a substantial risk of long lasting severe effects: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
A complete loss of sense of taste, or chronic fatigue are both entirely possible outcomes with children, and at this time, it's not clear at all how long these effects last.
Conversely, the effects of myocarditis, while unpleasant, are fairly well understood (and at least one physician I've spoken to was of the opinion that the vaccine related risk was overstated, as the base rate in that age group was bound to be higher than reported, due to the mild nature of most cases, so some of the elevated rates appear to be due to closer post-vaccination scrutiny).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-covid-19-coronavirus-vaccin...
OP is clearly talking about Alberta changing the laws about self-isolation. At some point, we are going to have to transition to using the same 'cultural norm' framework in dealing with Covid that we do with the flu.
For example, in Australia we have a 92-94% vaccination rate against measles (differs slightly by state) with the disease considered eliminated in 2014 [0]. Even still, in 2019 there was a small outbreak in Western Australia that lead to a big contact tracing effort and some forced isolation/quarantine of close contacts [1].
[0] https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/immunisation/childho...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-25/inside-the-operation-...
We (or at least, public health authorities; indiviudal citizens whose attention doesn't drop below the top story in the news are a different story)... haven't stopped facing the mountains of other public health issues.
For comparison, Oregon had a pretty hard lockdown. Its death rate is 68/100k. If the entire US had that same death rate, 390,000 Americans would still be alive today.
If you look at the data, it is clear that lockdown is not the only thing affecting death rate. But it also seems pretty obvious that social distancing did have a significant impact on the number of people who died. There are thousands of Americans that are dead today because people wanted to go to a party, or a restaurant, or a wedding.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
And there are tens of thousands of Americans who willingly gave their lives fighting in wars so that Americans (and citizens of various allied countries) could still do such things and live freely. A life driven just by fear of death is barely a life at all.
I’d assume FL has way more older folks than Oregon.
It’s like a preschool not locking down, having zero deaths then patting themselves on the back for it.
We should, of course, also wait until things have actually settled down and we don't keep having more periodic surges...
[0] how costly, exactly, things have been is another question that needs more investigation, especially for all types of interventions. E.g. if, after 2022, nowhere in the US institutes another Covid mask mandate or lockdown, all the folks hysterical about how "Covid is just an excuse for democrats to take your freedoms away and never give it back" should rethink a few things.
The Norwegians use the word texas to mean crazy.
'Pray for rain' type politicians and Taliban style government. (Rick Perry, the Bushes, Paxton and Abbott)
Cronyism run rampant.
Some of the most corrupt corporations.
The electrical grid collapse, Refinery explosions, West Fertilizer Company explosion, Result of letting corporations 'regulate themselves'
Cowboyism/Ignorance as a virtue.
One the most polluted states.
The only reason Texas can be in the world top 15 economy is due to population and landmass size, along with its dependency on oil. But given Texas is second in state population behind California and California is #5 in the world, I'd argue it's not doing as well as it could be.
Oh, and the weather in Texas is less preferable to having a weasel clamp down on your balls.
Alberta is Canada's biggest oil producing region similar to Texas. I do not think it was meant as a pejorative.
Just close down the border with them.
Meanwhile hospital admissions and deaths continue to rise, albeit slowly. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
Delta surged lasted 50 days in India and 45 days in the UK. We may see something similar
That would be nice
It reminds me of the financial news. "Commodities markets are spooked as backlash to latest Justin Bieber video mounts!"
In all seriousness, apart from the vaccination rate and strictly enforced lockdowns, I have yet to see an explanation for cases going up or down in a particular region that isn't contradicted by the results in some other region. I think we should just admit that except for vaccines and physically forcing 90% of the population into isolation, we don't have a clue what works and what doesn't.
We don’t even know the answer to whether delta is vaccine resistant. With challenge trials it would be dead simple. Take 10,000 vaccinated volunteers, randomize into a delta and alpha groups. Spray them in the face with Covid. Compare rates one week later. Question answered immediately with statistical certainty.
Right now, we’re trying to answer questions like this using nothing other than extremely messy observational data that’s subject to all sorts of uncontrollable confounding variables.
We have nearly the world's toughest lockdown in Sydney, and weeks later the cases are higher than ever.
Same thing happened here in Melbourne last year, with "officially" the toughest lockdown in the world, for 120 days. It was absolutely miserable.
It eventually works - but the UK eventually saw a similar precipitous decline, along the same timeframe, while only relinquishing restrictions.
The only common thread is that in 5-8 weeks, the spike reverses and plummets, regardless of policy.
(Lockdowns may keep the spike much lower, along with the general spread. But I'm more interested in why they seem to have no effect on arresting or reversing the spread once it takes hold.)
Perspective: Aussie, plugged in, watching the West and India closely.
Until we find viruses capable of teleportation, quarantine will remain a very effective strategy.
If that was true why can I take the population adjusted graphs for any interesting statistic, overlay several countries or states, and see the shape of them all is basically the same?
I would assert that for any of these non-pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile the effect on such charts should be absolutely noticeable to any layman on the street. If you need PhD level math to tell a country who "did it right" apart from a country who "did it wrong"... it probably means that it wasn't worth "doing right".
Edit:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-obesit...
Everyone had bad spikes and changes in circumstances eventually.
The US did uniquely badly in the first wave relative to Europe, and their fortunes reversed in the second wave.
Japan and Taiwan did great up front and more poorly later on.
It's not over yet, don't count anyone in or out.
I'd support this by noting that the numbers in Scotland surged earlier then started declining earlier (where universities and schools go on summer holidays weeks before England). When English schools later broke up for summer, numbers there started declining too.
So no doubt numbers will start going up again when school returns, and will do so first in Scotland - as the virus burns through the young, unvaccinated population.
I think this Autumn will reveal whether the vaccinations are giving us the protection needed to gradually open up society again.
For my part I really hope it does, as it will also encourage other countries to do the same and give the vaccination campaign a worldwide boost.
Note the peak is around a week _prior_ the end of the school term in England (23 July), and this is true across basically all age groups.
And this isn't really an issue so long as the overwhelming majority of the old and vulnerable are vaccinated. But there still the potential for scary looking case numbers but not so much death numbers.
You have coronavirus symptoms. During the middle of a surge in cases, the government has announced that all coronavirus restrictions have ended and everybody can go back to normal. The vast majority of older and vulnerable people have been fully vaccinated.
Do you:
A: get a test and risk having to isolate
B: not get a test and live your life like normal as the government said you should
further, the borders remained open so people mixed at home and then went on holiday/visited family etc. UK is a major international transport hub and also has a large population of Indian descent so we likely "imported" delta from India relatively early as a result and then likely helped seed it in other western nations.
They should have put India on the red list several weeks earlier than they did when it was obvious for anyone to see what was going on, but they delayed for unknown reasons
Being in central London right now, through anecdotal evidence I don't think we've suddenly become less sociable.
- [1] UK infections grouped by age. School years 6, 7, 11, and 12 are ages 11, 12, 17, and 18 respectively. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
I have some doubts about how generalizable the results are. A circuit party is not a produce aisle.
The % of total population who actually visits nightclubs is pretty low, so it took like a monh for this segment to hit herd immunity basically
Doesn’t mean their immune system did nothing though. I’d wager a lot of UK population basically got an ”organic 3rd vaccine dose”. My prediction is they have probably the highest immunity rates in the world atm
Isn't that how the vaccination regime is supposed to work, actually? With two jabs in, contracting Covid still comes with something like 4%..20% hit rate.[ß] However, with two jabs the risk of hospitalisation is mercifully low, and roughly half of the cases are asymptomatic.
So instead of vaccinated people overloading the NHS, when they do get unlucky, they are much more likely to get through with only mild symptoms. For majority that "organic 3rd dose" works as a booster shot. They can still infect others, though...
NB. As far as I know, there are no good studies on how Long Covid manifests in a vaccinated population. I think the working assumption is that very mild symptomatic Covid also ends up with less severe Long Covid, but have heard of no data to back that up.
ß: Depending on the study, the vaccine in question and the variant. IIRC 2xPfizer provides ~88% protection against Delta, 95%+ against earlier non-Beta variants; 2xAstraZeneca provides 60%+ protection against Delta, 90%+ against non-Betas.
Disclosure: UK resident, with two jabs.
Other countries had some of these factors. Few if any had all of these factors.
What happened next? The vaccines turned out to be really effective.
The UK certainly doesn't have all of them for a start.
The lock-downs had high levels of compliance, just a lot of people moaning from their sofa (or whatever soapbox they have available, reach varies greatly, inversely with intelligence in many cases).
Population density, travel hub, obesity levels, delayed first lock-down would be my list.
Instead he managed to brew an exciting new variant, which is what every health official was warning against.
And I'm guessing that unless the majority of the population are rapidly inoculated then exciting new strains could constantly evolve until we have something truly nasty.
It's much more likely to have peaked because of Euro finals on 11th July and school holidays starting on 15th July
It should take about a week to start seeing the effect of a change in policy. From incubation time to testing to results. Usually, we count two weeks to be sure.
It could be coincidence but this date was planned and intentional.
I could reframe your hypothesis in a falsifiable way such as "perhaps ending lockdowns in the UK caused individuals to spend more time outdoors or in open air restaurants rather than smaller closed doors activities such as dinner parties", or "perhaps ending lockdowns in the UK caused people to spend more time in other locations rather than large shared ventilation apartment complexes".
From this article:
> “Something strange is happening in Britain,” the Washington Post declared this week. “COVID cases are plummeting instead of soaring.” A few weeks ago, when the country’s new daily-case total was around 60,000, the prominent British epidemiologist and government adviser Neil Ferguson declared that a rise to 100,000 a day was inevitable, and that 200,000 a day was possible. The country is now at 27,000 and falling.
Most models predict initially exponential growth of rate of infection per day, before a flattening off to a steady number of cases per day,and eventually a declining number of cases per day.
Yet in the case of the UK. there is exponential growth, followed by very sudden exponential decay, with no gradual flattening off phase.
It appears that the sudden "switch" is likely caused by a large unmodelled effect.
Possible causes I see:
* Schools stopped on that day, and >half the transmission was occurring in school age children mixing with their peers. That would cause the graph we see.
* Schools stopped that day, and lots of people were only testing themselves as a requirement for attending school. Now that school is over, they have stopped testing. That would also cause the graph we see, but real infection rates would now be higher than suggested by test results. this hypothesis is backed up by the daily number of tests done seeing a big shift (previously few tests were done on friday and saturday, now it's more even).
* The weather changed and now people are spending more time outdoors, reducing transmission.
* It's summertime and a lot of people are taking summer breaks rather than working.
* Another variant, or maybe a totally different virus, is spreading which isn't picked up by current tests (and displacing the current one by causing cross-immunity).
Just want to point out so much of what we are doing now is essentially because of his suggestions.
In contrast, the UK thing is much stranger (at least for now).
Predicting the future is hard and if you're obviously not good at it, you should stop doing it.
The bit about vaccinated being eight times less likely to get infected, should make those who are still unsure think again.
And on the other hand it should give pause to those thinking about enforcing vaccine mandates.
Does anyone here have anything to say about their quality or their relevance to people who don't live in NY?
It has always been well-regarded, think of it as a more puckish New Yorker (although in recent years, The New Yorker has certainly taken on more personality, especially online), and I would argue, was one of the first “prestige” magazines to really embrace online and digital expansion. It took until well into the 2010s for a lot of the Condé Nast and Hearst publications to even integrate their digital and print newsrooms, with digital often being treated as an afterthought. New York Mag really embraced online early and as a result, didn’t have the same identity issues once the bottom dropped out of print’s profitability. It used to be a weekly magazine but swapped to biweekly seven or eight years ago.
I’ve been a subscriber since I was in college (which was before I moved to New York City), which coincided with the online push and the reign of editor-in-chief Adam Moss (who was EIC from 2004-2019), and since 2004, I believe NYMag has won more National Magazine Awards (which are sort of the magazine world’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes, albeit with less prestige) than any other publication.
There are several “verticals” for New York Mag, which include Vulture (culture), The Cut (lifestyle and more of a focus on women), Grub Street (restaurants and bars), Intelligencer (tech, politics, ideas).
Vox bought the magazine a few years ago, but it operates relatively independently from the other Vox media sites (Vox, The Verge, etc.), at least as far as editorial content goes. (I’m sure they share resources like HR and some ad sales stuff, same as Conde and Hearst and Meredith.)
*I don’t and have never worked at New York Mag, but as a former New York City-based journalist, I have friends who do or have worked there and I’ve met Pam Wasserstein, the former CEO (current president of Vox Media), socially a few times.
1. Schools closing (~2 weeks earlier in Scotland than England)
2. Euros [football tournament] ending (Scotland fell out ~2 weeks earlier than England)
3. Hot weather (leading to events outdoors or more ventilation or less going out or something else bad for the virus)
4. The “pingdemic” where the contact-tracing app tells many people to self-isolate
5. The end of a big burst of weddings scheduled when restrictions were due to ease
6. Herd immunity
7. Maybe lots of people went on holiday and mostly kept to themselves.
8. Some statistical anomaly hiding case numbers that are not falling (eg fewer tests->fewer total positive cases)
I don’t really believe 7 or 8 and everything else feels too unsupported. Perhaps time will tell what the cause is but I think I am weakly optimistic about current trends. We shall have to see.
76% with one dose,66.7% with two doses. Number of cases are going down from about 400 a day a week ago to about 200+ this week per day.
Lateral flow tests just happened to run out on the day restrictions were lifted. [0] And tada numbers plummet right when gov is taking massive heat for dropping restrictions in the middle of a surge.
Yes really - that is how the current UK gov rolls.
The fact that the author is trying to extrapolate other countries future trajectory based on that is rather amusing.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/lateral-flow...
The U.K.’s Delta Surge Is Collapsing. Will Ours?
There is some evidence that booster shots after 6 months can provide better even better protection than the second shot after 3-4 weeks, but it's not clear whether they will be necessary yet, especially when so much of the world is still desperate to get the first two shots in peoples' arms.
This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis: A double-blind randomized trial for an mRNA vaccine with 44k participants showed nearly identical all-cause mortality in vaccinated vs. placebo groups after six months [1]. The delta wave will almost certainly be less fatal, but there is no evidence to indicate that widespread vaccination is the primary causal factor, or even a contributing factor, for the reduced mortality.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...
A preprint that did address deaths[1] found a vaccine effectiveness of 98.7% against death. This is not consistent with your claim of "no evidence."
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.21.21255873v...
And yes, it does show a dramatic effect on infections and serious illness. This is great, and we should shout it from the rooftops! But a journalist writing that vaccines are the reason Covid mortality will drop 90% is projecting, not reporting facts.
No factual basis in that paper but you seem to be saying "no factual basis at all" which is flat-out wrong, indeed basing such a claim on one paper is disingenuous: Absence of evidence in 1 chosen paper is not evidence of absence in general.
You only have to compare the linkage between cases and deaths in UK waves 1 and 2, with the much lower level of deaths for comparable numbers of cases in wave 3, to see the "much, much smaller death toll" staring you in the face.
Your chosen paper is also largely irrelevant before we even get there; it's about mRNA vaccines, whereas the UK's program has leaned heavily on AZ, which is not.
There was such a dramatic reduction in overall cases in the vaccination group that deaths are probably more statistical noise in both groups than being tied to covid one way or another.
Currently deaths and cases have diverged dramatically in the population and this might be more indicative of the real world vaccine performance as it pertains to reducing death.
But the same number of people died in each group. So vaccines do not reduce Covid-19 mortality, period. Does this mean vaccines are a waste of time? No, of course not! It just means we should be precise and correct in the claims we make based on statistics, and not fudge them to say things that sound good but are not true.
EDIT: Fair enough, I'm making the same sloppy mistakes... this study doesn't say anything, positive or negative, about vaccine effects on mortality. But it certainly doesn't support the journalist's claim. It does support the claim that vaccines dramatically reduce infection rates and severity, which is great and reason enough to get vaccinated.
I do think it’s disingenuous to say that the vaccine categorically doesn’t prevent deaths, if it can prevent infections that would lead to deaths, that’s a good outcome. Additionally, the real world performance in the general population is showing a massive divergence in deaths and cases in elderly populations after the coverage of vaccines. That may be from some other variable and not vaccines, but I’m not sure that I would be able to suggest an alternative cause.
Or, if I follow your flawed logic, Covid vaccines reduce mortality by 50%!
Those are all-cause death. The number of covid-related deaths were 2 in the placebo and 1 in the vaccine arms. There simply weren't many covid deaths during this part of the trial (probably because most of the participants were <55 years old).
But anyways, my original point was that the journalist is being dishonest by claiming that vaccination among the elderly is the reason mortality should drop by 90% compared to prior waves. This RCT certainly doesn't provide any evidence to support that statement, and it is the largest study of its kind so the only conclusion I can make is that the journalist is just projecting without facts.
What exactly do you mean "should" ? It has. It did.
45.000 people is simply too small a number to draw such a conclusion. However, we are currently collecting a large amount of worldwide data, and that shows very strong reduced mortality and hospitalization on the vaccinated population. This is much higher quality data to draw conclusions on.
Sorry, what is the relevance of this trial to the parent story about the UK?
The vast majority of the UK's elderly and at-risk people got the first vaccines available there - the AstraZeneca jab, which is not a mRNA vaccine.