Kerb Hohl wrote:wco81 wrote:coldfish wrote:
Transmissibility calculations are complicated to the point where they are almost guesses. When the virus first showed up in the US, there were areas that had r0 numbers around 8. A ton of things affect that, including human behaviors, immunity, etc.
You can see there that the Indian variant is spreading much more slowly in the US than it did in the UK, perhaps due to our reliance on mrna vaccines and getting double vaccinated. Perhaps I bashed Fauci too quickly on that one.
Regardless, when you take the percentage times case numbers for the indian variant in the US, it is going up but just barely. The r0 number is only slightly over 1. Remember that the percentages are of total cases, which is actually going down.
If this pattern holds, we will start to see cases rise within the next month, but only marginally like what happened with b117, before they start to decline again. This is almost exactly what b117 looked like in February or so.
The fear is a surge in the fall and winter. Maybe not as big as last fall/winter but in low vaccination areas.
Not even close to as big as last fall/winter given vaccinations and prior infection immunity. Even the lower vaccination rate areas still are going to be reasonably high, especially by then.
The big variable is the duration of the immunity. No one has an answer on that and the guesses aren't even particularly educated at this point, given that we have nothing comparable to go by.
If immunity from vaccination and infection fades after 6 months, next year could be just as bad as last year but there is a mountain of evidence at this point that immunity lasts longer than that.
Next issue is a new variant. If you get a mutation that allows the virus to jump past immunity, its functionally the same thing. That said, the virus seems to be converging into a few mutations. Its not like all the variants have random different mutations and the virus is diverging. All of the mutations seem to be common and what makes the Indian variant the most dangerous is that it has most of the adaptions. We know that the pfizer and moderna protect against the Indian variant so it seems to be a low probability item.