COVID + 18

This is going to be my last monthly Covid update, though I may do occasional posts on specific aspects.

The Delta wave which severely impacted South and Southeast Asia seems to be receding, as it is in most of Latin America, except perhaps Mexico.  In Europe it has now spread to some of the countries in the east.  The Africa data remains difficult to interpret.

The situation in the U.S. is mixed.  Overall cases are down by about 20% in the past couple of weeks but deaths have not declined.  If cases continue to decline we'd expect deaths to start doing the same over the next 10-14 days.  However, the U.S. also has confounding factors, including geography, what appears to be seasonal patterns, and differing vaccination rates, so whether the current trends continue is in question.

Last year we had patterns where the southern states had a summer wave, followed by the upper midwest and then the northeast over the winter.  Will it repeat or will Delta moderate when it gets to the most vaccinated states?  We are already seeing some increase as it moves north.  An anomaly is what Florida experienced, compared to states like Arkansas and Mississippi which had very low vaccination rates.  When the wave started Florida stood around #20 in vaccination rates, with rates about equal to or slightly higher than a number of northern states but the Delta wave was much worse than last summer's wave.  Figuring out why this occurred may also help better understand how the virus works. 

Small differences in vaccination rates can lead to large differences in the worst outcomes.  Let's take the UK as a comparison.  65.5% of its population is fully vaccinated and 5.9% partially.  In the US it's 54.5% fully vaccinated and 8.9 partially.  If you look at Covid cases and deaths on a per capita basis, the UK 7-day average is about the same as the US peak of two weeks ago but the US 7-day average death rate is over twice as high as the Brits.  Do the math and it means if you were to scale up the UK population to that of the US, the US is experiencing 1,000 more deaths a day than the UK, which I think primarily attributable to the difference in vaccination rates.

Meanwhile, we'll be getting our flu shots and the covid booster as we are now more than seven months out from our second shots.

Let's hope this is the last big wave before we are left with covid as an endemic virus with occasional larger outbreaks.  As much as I don't like the prospect, this is going to be something we will have to learn to live with at some level.

And if you want to keep up with developments on the story around covid origins read Alina Chan.