Cases in the UK are up and to the right.
Probably due to the new strain.
What does that mean for your country? 🧵
Deaths are ~2 weeks delayed vs cases in the UK.
Since cases have doubled in the UK over the last 2 weeks, deaths will likely ~2x in the next 2 weeks, blowing past the April record.
Hospitalizations are already there.
Imagine the consequences for the healthcare system, and all the ppl who will also suffer because of its renewed collapse.
Look how the map of the new strain in England compares with the map of incidence in the UK
And look how fast it went from prevalent in a corner to spreading everywhere: A few weeks.
Here's the sequencing per case in different countries. Sorry it's so hard to read (look at the grey bars. Be careful, it's logarithmic. 1 means 100%) bit.ly/2X5vqsX
That's unveiling the countries that are unaware of the outbreak they might be brewing because they aren't sequencing enough: US, ES, IN, BR, FR, RU, DE, IT, MX...
OK so now we have a catastrophic situation in the UK, likely caused by a new strain that is now in 33 countries, probably more, and most don't know the extent of it because they aren't sequencing much.
How long before the new strain explodes in new countries?
To figure that out, we can look at how quickly new #COVID strains prevailed in the past. D614G took 2-3 weeks to win. But at the time, there were no lockdowns. R was likely much higher.
What about variant 20A.EU1? Within a couple of weeks it was in half of sequences in Spain. But it took 2-3 months before it would take a strong hold in other countries.
That strain, however, did not have a higher transmission rate.
This one does.
Where and how fast the new strain hits, then, is a matter of measures and luck.
Countries with lots of sequencing, a strong fence, and strong local measures might delay the strain enough to get its population vaccinated. Eg Israel.
Many don't.
They're gambling.
Matter of time.
Do you think this is well covered by the media already, or does it deserve an article?
I post ~one article a month generally. bit.ly/tpueyo
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If person W says “I was wrong, you were right”, our immediate reaction is that the right person (R) is better, smarter, and will gloat. W is humiliated, proven ignorant.
That’s why those in the wrong don’t want to acknowledge it, and hence mutter sorry
R hears muttering, and doesn’t think W really means it. So she’s not satisfied either.
But why? R did get an apology.
It’s because the point of the apology is to make sure it won’t happen again.
And now for good news. Another failure of linear thinking: Vaccine rollouts.
Disregard comments such as “With the current level of vaccinations, it will take 3 years to vaccinate everybody!”
We will not have the current level of vaccinations for long.
Over the next few weeks, you will see how daily vaccination rates steadily increase. This is something humans, markets and govs are good at: making one single thing happen when there’s a huge incentive.
Even a linear growth in daily vaccinations would get lots of ppl vaccinated fast (quadratic growth):
Eg, If today the US vaccinates 100k ppl, tomorrow 120k, and 20k more every day, after 1 week you have 1.1M vaccinated, but by the end of next week 3.2M are vaccinated.
2. The evidence of the transmission-virulence tradeoff theory is not that clear. This fantastic paper explains it well. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
The new virus strain is ~60% more infectious. We haven’t processed what that means.🧵
1. Western countries that didn’t stop the previous variant won’t be able to stop this one. It’s already in UK, US, FR, NL... that we know. Probably many more places. cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19…
The time to close borders was this summer. Or a month ago. It’s too late now for most countries.
2. If countries had a hard time stopping it before, they will have a much much harder time now. If it’s 60% more infectious, R0 has gone from 2.7 to ~4.3 on average.
Countries that stopped the virus from spreading got R from 2.7 to 1, a reduction of ~60%. Now, they need to reduce R by ~75%.
But remember: all the low-hanging fruit is already used (masks, social distancing...). The next measures are all more expensive.
Most media outlets are like bioweapon labs that release viruses into the population.
News, like viruses, are parasites that add no value to their host (or even destroy it) but are great at spreading.
How can you vaccinate yourself from them?🧵
There are mechanisms for good entities to interact in a body. Viruses hijack those mechanisms to multiply and spread. For example, the coronavirus’ spike protein opens some cell up for invasion. Once in, the virus reproduces and then leaves to infect other cells.
The same thing happens with news. They hijack mental biases to spread.
For example, the chronicle of events, full of homicides, is mostly worthless. They are just remote anecdotes. A much better data point would be tracking the curve of homicides in your community.
What was the impact of the article Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now?
Now that 2020 is ending (finally), and that Medium has published it was its most read article of 2020, I wanted to look back to those few days in March.