It’s been a while since I tried to understand the quite complicated American Covid situation.
It seem fair to say that there was a big wave after July 4, that was biggest in the south, and which now shows signs of subsiding.
Would it be accurate to say that this was mostly a Delta strain wave?
It occurs to me that until now, in looking for hard facts about how Covid behaves in the era of vaccinations, national-scale data has mostly come from smaller countries like Israel and the UK. But maybe there is now enough data, that we can try to understand (and model) the 3Q2021 wave in the much bigger USA.
The two main questions seem to be, why was it biggest in the south, and why is it now subsiding?
E.g. was it big in the south because of low vaccination, or because of fewer public-health restrictions? (I don’t mean that these are the only two possible explanations.)
And, is it subsiding because of vaccination, or also because of buildup of natural immunity?
The folk wisdom about the vaccines, after the experiences of the smaller countries, seems to be that they don’t do much to stop the spread, but they do mostly stop you from dying. I will be interested to see what the American data says.
Meanwhile, from a political or cultural perspective, the USA seems to be continuing on two paths as usual, with the federal government and states like California coercively pushing for maximum vaccination, and states like Florida and Texas being the new resistance to this.
I have no idea about the future—whether there will be a future Delta wave among those who are presently uninfected, whether new strains will arrive next year and require boosters for everyone, and how severe the public health restrictions would be for any new strain.
It’s been a while since I tried to understand the quite complicated American Covid situation.
It seem fair to say that there was a big wave after July 4, that was biggest in the south, and which now shows signs of subsiding.
Would it be accurate to say that this was mostly a Delta strain wave?
It occurs to me that until now, in looking for hard facts about how Covid behaves in the era of vaccinations, national-scale data has mostly come from smaller countries like Israel and the UK. But maybe there is now enough data, that we can try to understand (and model) the 3Q2021 wave in the much bigger USA.
The two main questions seem to be, why was it biggest in the south, and why is it now subsiding?
E.g. was it big in the south because of low vaccination, or because of fewer public-health restrictions? (I don’t mean that these are the only two possible explanations.)
And, is it subsiding because of vaccination, or also because of buildup of natural immunity?
The folk wisdom about the vaccines, after the experiences of the smaller countries, seems to be that they don’t do much to stop the spread, but they do mostly stop you from dying. I will be interested to see what the American data says.
Meanwhile, from a political or cultural perspective, the USA seems to be continuing on two paths as usual, with the federal government and states like California coercively pushing for maximum vaccination, and states like Florida and Texas being the new resistance to this.
I have no idea about the future—whether there will be a future Delta wave among those who are presently uninfected, whether new strains will arrive next year and require boosters for everyone, and how severe the public health restrictions would be for any new strain.