The U.K.’s Delta Surge Is Collapsing. Will Ours?

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Media coverage of last week's internal CDC presentation elided some very important context, including the most hopeful and encouraging facts about the Delta surge, writes dwallacewells

Photo: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images On Thursday night, with the equivalent of a five-alarm siren, the Washington Post and New York Times, along with other media outlets, blared the major bullet points of an internal CDC slide presentation explaining a recent shift in mask guidance: The Delta variant was “as contagious as chicken pox,” according to the presentation, and “may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated,” as the Times put it.

The most hopeful and encouraging facts about the Delta surge were even harder to find in the coverage. The first is that, thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, however fast this disease spreads it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90 percent or more of the country’s total COVID-19 mortality risk. The second is that, in those countries with roughly comparable vaccination rates to the U.S.

To a layperson, the shape of all of these surges may seem strange — a spike that often stops short of full penetration of the population. And yet it is a quite common pattern of epidemiological “waves” long predating this disease. “However efficient the virus is, it’s not capable of reaching everyone,” Eric Topol of Scripps told me last week. “Just as the 1918 flu pandemic didn’t get to everyone.

Nevertheless, he said, immunity alone probably doesn’t explain the across-the-board collapse in British cases, because the vaccine coverage is so much spottier than that trend would suggest. Instead, you’d likely need widespread behavior change within those groups, particularly among the young males who had really driven the surge. He, too, cited school closures, as well as the end of the European soccer championships, which produced so much congregating among young men.

“No one expected it to go up so quickly, and no one expected it to go down so quickly,” said Gu. “I think the short answer is just that the pandemic is unpredictable, even for scientists.” Today, the article reads almost like a Delta prophecy. “Although injected vaccines do reduce symptomatic COVID cases, and prevent a lot of severe illness, they may still allow for asymptomatic infection,” they wrote. “The reason is that the coronavirus can temporarily take up residence in the mucosa — the moist, mucus-secreting surfaces of the nose and throat that serve as our first line of defense against inhaled viruses.

 

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dwallacewells 90% of the population received at least one dose of a vaccine. Start with that.

dwallacewells The CDC's bungling of simple, digestible messaging for the layman is remarkable. Also, you want to vaccinate the MAGA? Make it a conspiracy. 'Leak' the memo describing the dangers of Delta to the unvaxxed, make MAGA vaccinate to own the libs'.

dwallacewells very well written

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