Thread by @FHeisbourg

PANDEMIC'S PROGRESS ( thread
1. GLOBAL: This is possibly the darkest moment up to now, with ca 16K daily deaths worldwide. At this rate the 2 million toll will be reached by mid January. Remember: undercounting is the norm
2. SEASONAL OR NOT? Much hope is placed in Europe,US 1/

...on pandemic's supposedly seasonal nature because of SARSCoV-2's propensity for cool temperatures. Fact is that in Brazil, it's definitely not winter & pandemic is running amok as badly as it did a few months ago, at +1K daily deaths, breaching 200 K level on 8 JAN. 2/

3. VARIANTS: B117 variant probably explains the pandemic's rampage in UK with +1.3K daily deaths. What is less clear is whether insufficiently detected B117 (and/or South African V2) outside of UK & RSA are already playing a role, or not, in pandemic's ongoing global surge. 3/

Note: I always assumed that genomic analysis of the virus's mutations was a top priority in the war against COVID, & that sequencing would be systematic & large scale in all reasonably well equipped countries. Given the precedents of Spanish flu, SARS and H5N1, this was a ... 4/

...fair assumption. But this was utterly wrong. The UK with its intensive genomic tracking was an exception. What does this tell us about @WHO 's guidelines (or their implementation) and about the weakness of US, EU, Japan's, Russia's, China's and others' shortcomings? 5/

4. US is doing worse than ever, at 4K daily deaths and a national toll of at 1130 per million (among countries of more than 20 million inhabitants, only UK and Italy do worse). It is set to exceed a 400K toll by 20 JAN

5. EU is also experiencing +4K daily deaths. 400 K toll 6/

...this weekend. Here again, situation is worse than it ever was. Only 7 members have fatality rates below 500 per million (Finland lowest at 106).Of these, Ireland (469) & especially Germany (481) are close to that level. Erstwhile best-performing Slovakia has joined the rest 7/

BOTTOM-LINES:
1) Vaccination can't happen too quickly nor too massively 2) If highly transmissible B117 variant spreads (has spread?) widely beyond UK, estimates of herd immunity must presumably be revised upwards of previous studies (also means need for higher vaccination rates)