An uncertain new stage of the pandemic.Cases surge, but deaths do not

So many things went wrong with the American reaction PandemicBut two important things are done right. Scientists developed the vaccine and older Americans got the vaccine. According to the Mayo Clinic, 76% of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 take at least one dose. Vaccination tracker.. It is 91% between the ages of 65 and 74, and 87 between the ages of 75 and over. (Slightly fewer have received two full doses.) The blue states are a little more compliant and the red states are a little less, but the regional differences between older Americans are not that great. Even in the bright red state of South Carolina, 93 percent of older people receive at least one dose. In Nebraska there is 95%, and in Idaho and Florida the numbers are 90% and 98%, respectively. There were no major campaigns to combat disinformation among older people, and there was no detectable conversion of anti-vaxxer older people to professional science liberals. “They have the same concerns about vaccines, but when they made the risk benefits, it was very clear to them that the risks were very serious,” said a poll on the Kaiser Family Foundation pandemic. Morian Brody to do, told me. This has a dark irony. For months, conservative TV presenters have been furious with most older audiences about the madness of the vaccine campaign. Tucker Carlson crumpled his face and said the word “Forch” in the Old Testament threat.Source of the RebelsTimes A reporter named Alex Berenson rattled the statistics with a rhythm that sounded embarrassingly designed. Throughout all that, this elderly audience faithfully adjusted from armchairs in Idaho and South Carolina while already fully vaccinated. They don’t take the TV campaign literally or seriously. They understood that it was for the show.

Widely effective vaccinations for older Americans and embarrassingly ineffective vaccinations for everyone else Highly contagious delta mutant He won the microbial war and gave the pandemic the current uncertainty. Cases are on the rise, but deaths are not. One of the reasons for this strange situation is that the risk of death from the coronavirus is concentrated in the elderly. Most older people are currently vaccinated. At the start of the pandemic, Dartmouth economist Andrew Levin said COVID-19 years old (he first used data from South Korea, Iceland, Sweden and New Zealand because he was first available), created a table that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still uses. He read me the numbers on the phone just returning from the Congressional hearing. At the age of 30, one in 5,000 infected and unvaccinated Americans may be expected to die. 1 in 1500 at the age of 40. At age 70; 1 in 40. At age 80, nearly 1 in 10 people are nearly 500 times more likely to die at age 30. Vaccination of the elderly was an essential precaution. It kept vulnerable people safe and gave everyone a little more freedom. Levin did the calculations for me and even though only half of the Americans were fully vaccinated, those vaccines (focused on the most vulnerable) reduced infection mortality by about 75%. I presumed that it was done. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, said: It’s not the same anymore. “

That’s why we were so optimistic at the beginning of summer. As the Delta subspecies becomes more prevalent, the relationship between the virus and the most serious illnesses is different from the past. Since mid-June, the 7-day average of new cases in the United States has increased by 550% from about 14,000 to about 77,000. However, the number of deaths is about the same. The national 7-day moving average of daily deaths in mid-June was about 350. It was 301 on Friday. (According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the level is COVID It is currently the seventh leading cause of death, well below heart disease and cancer, well below accidents, strokes, respiratory illnesses and Alzheimer’s disease, and slightly above diabetes. ) The UK experience, where the delta mutant had already peaked, was similar.Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota and involved in the Biden-Harris transition COVID-19 The Advisory Board has sorted data from the UK surge this summer by age group and compared it to data from the country’s previous surge. He pointed out that the number of cases was about the same. But what about death? “Way down, way down, way down.”

Now there is news that brings to the fore the problems posed by the proliferation of cases where people are infected with the virus but do not die from it.Thursday, Washington officer It was published Slide deck leak From the CDC, which summarizes what scientists have discovered about new variants: Delta is much more contagious than previous strains and leads to more serious illnesses. Most surprisingly, the CDC slide refers to recent data from Barnstable County, Massachusetts, where vaccinated people with breakthrough infections were with unvaccinated people. It had the same high viral load. This outlier was outlier in several respects (male accounted for 85% of cases, 6% of individuals were identified as HIV positive, and the CDC added several other warnings), but its publication Is a public debate about whether vaccinated people can spread the virus more easily than previously thought. The slide deck did not contain any new information about death. The data show that the vaccine still remains and is widely protected, but I am convinced that unvaccinated people are at increased risk of serious illness and that vaccination is no longer completely safe. Is not … “Given the nature of Delta, I don’t think it’s easy to say right away. People will be vaccinated or infected,” said Hanage of Harvard University.

The pressure associated with increasing cases is already felt in certain low-vaccination areas of the country, such as Missouri, Florida, and the Gulf Coast. In Louisiana, where about 36% of the population is fully vaccinated, new cases have increased tenfold since the beginning of June.Number of children being treated COVID-19 at New Orleans Children’s Hospital, the only dedicated pediatric facility between Houston and Atlanta, has grown from 4 on Monday to 16 on Wednesday and 20 by Thursday morning. When the hospital was nearly full, his doctor, Mark Klein, told me that children with serious illness in the South would have to be taken to a hospital in an area where they had little experience in treating their serious illness. Told. I asked him for a colloquial explanation of Children’s situation. “We are full of gills,” Klein said. “We will be in a hurt world.”

In addition to this type of systemic tension, the increase in cases also requires different calculations regarding personal risk. If vaccinated adults are still able to take over the disease, it is possible that they will begin to behave differently around unvaccinated children and older parents whose rare breakthrough infections may be devastating. Means that is high.As the number of infected Americans increases, so does the number of people at risk of so-called long. COVID— Patterns of neurological, respiratory, and other symptoms that appear to remain in some patients after the virus has progressed. A recent large study based on records from the United Kingdom National Health Service COVID, 4.8% showed debilitating symptoms that affected daily life for 12 consecutive weeks.Elaine Thompson of King’s College London, one of the lead authors of the study, emphasized to me the importance of a long time. COVID: “The impact it has on work, education and parent-child relationships-it’s a big problem.”

COVID After vaccination and after the delta mutation, the disease differs from previous versions in several ways. Or, at least, it has different characteristics. Even those who carefully study their risks early in the pandemic and decide what they are doing and what they are not good at now need to readjust for the various risks. It’s not just about feeling different. wrong. Osterholm of the University of Minnesota said: However, it should not be confused with the incredible effects of these vaccines, even in a surge. Incidents may be on the rise, but the dramatic change in deaths cannot be ruled out. Osterholm pointed out that if the American pattern followed what happened in the UK, it would pass the peak of Delta Surge by approximately Labor Day in 3-5 weeks. By that time, we need to be sure that the altered relationship between case and death is maintained. At that time, it may be a little easier to breathe.

Not all elements of this pandemic enable human decisions.Still, it’s interesting how many very special patterns there are COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States predict the current situation. We have paid attention to the risks to the vulnerable and very few are dying. We were lazy about keeping our health. As a result, diseases that may have been more limited can now become endemic. In this regard, “we had the best medical gift and threw it out the window,” said Markel of the University of Michigan. However, it may make sense to think that vaccine resistance is characterized by a depressing level of self-interest rather than a red-blue political division.The tale of COVID In the United States: First, more than 300,000 people died in 2020. After that, the vaccine became available. Most people who became very vulnerable with age were vaccinated. Most of the less vulnerable people (the advantage of vaccination would have been primarily to protect others) were not. There are many warnings, but for now, this self-interest effect seems to be the pandemic we are seeing right now.

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