CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

I agree. If I were appointed dictator for a day, I’d implement a vaccine passport without any reservations. But there’s no way the Federal Government will go there. The vaccinated will remain handcuffed to the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated will remain the dictionary definition of free riders.

Interesting article in The Atlantic: Expect the Unexpected From the Delta Variant.

It considers why the UK’s Alpha variant didn’t cause an expected Springtime wave in the US save for an outbreak in Michigan despite being 50% more transmissible than the original virus.

Delta has gotten so much attention because it has the most troubling collection of traits yet: It is markedly more transmissible than Alpha, can sicken a large proportion of people who have had only one dose of a vaccine (though not those who have had two), and may even cause more severe disease. All of this is enough to be a warning, especially as Delta is now responsible for 10 percent of U.S. cases and rising. But as with Alpha, which was also suspected to be more severe, how the variant ends up behaving in the real world will depend on more than its biology. It will also depend on how we—the virus’s hosts—choose to behave, how many more people we vaccinate, and, to some extent, how lucky we get.

All of these factors are likely to have played a role in the Alpha-associated springtime spike in Michigan. According to cellphone mobility data from that period, people in the state had gone back to nearly pre-pandemic levels of movement, says Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. The Alpha variant also got to Michigan relatively early, and happened to find its way into groups of young people who were not yet eligible to be vaccinated. “It was sort of bad timing,” Martin told me. If Alpha had arrived a little later, or the vaccines a little earlier, then Michigan might have looked more like the rest of the country, where immunization was able to blunt Alpha’s impact. In the race between variants and vaccines elsewhere in the U.S., vaccines won.

Two concepts about viral spread help explain why timing and chance make such a difference. First, the coronavirus spreads exponentially, which means that even a slight delay in mitigation efforts can lead to dramatically different outcomes. Second, the virus’s spread is what epidemiologists call “overdispersed,” which means that the majority of patients do not infect anyone else but a small handful might infect dozens of people. In other words, most sparks of infection do not catch fire. But occasionally a single infection might cause an early super-spreader event, which ends up seeding a major outbreak. “Looking from state to state, it can be like, ‘Well, why is this state doing well versus that state?’ Sometimes it’s just luck,” says Adam Lauring, a virologist at the University of Michigan.