India's cases are rapidly declining, now down from over 400k per day to just over 100k per day.
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The rate of decline is about as fast as the increase, about 33% per week. Much faster than the first peak decline in the fall of last year. The attached logarithmic plot shows this as well.
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Looking at the situation by state we see the declines across states. The largest peak in Maharashtra is down by more than 4X.
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Here is a fire plot which doesn't yet show significant geographical contraction by state.
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However, within states there is significant geographical contraction. Our colleague Sunil Raina reports three states have explicitly adopted the green zone strategy. These are Gujrat, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh.
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Uttar Pradesh has a population of over 200 million, it is the highest population subnational political division in the world. The government has launched a #ZeroCovid policy rewarding villages that are covid free. Rapid response teams have been galvanized.
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As of last week 66% of vilages achieved #ZeroCovid and the number of cases in Uttar Pradesh has declined from nearly 38,000 to just over 1,200, a factor of over 30X! Much faster than the country as a whole. At 6 per million it is about 6X smaller than the US per population.
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We will report more about the Green Zone strategy of Uttar Pradesh in upcoming days.
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Alert: UK sees a large uptick in infections -- up 69% from last week -- despite 60% of people at least partially vaccinated, 40% fully vaccinated, and partial social distancing measures still in place.
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US vaccination rates are similar to the UK: 51% at least partially vaccinated, 41.5% fully vaccinated. Cases are still falling, but the Indian variant is not dominant. As the recent UK rise shows, cases can rise abruptly again, despite large numbers being vaccinated.
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Colombia reports 30,000 new cases -- the biggest one-day increase on record.
At this year's World Health Assembly, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison advocates ending the pandemic. This is in contrast to many officials planning to accept Covid as a permanent part of life.
More attention must be paid to _eliminating_ all variants rather than tolerating them. If we eliminated COVID-19 --- which we CAN -- we wouldn't need to name variants at all. Intentional success is possible in a few months.
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Stigma for countries of origin makes no sense... At the rate we're going, every country will have its own dangerous variant soon.
The main issue isn't stigma over their variant -- it's that ALL countries are will suffer due to the continued tolerance of COVID!
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Vietnam this month has its largest spike in COVID-19 cases, possibly due to a newly detected variant combining mutations of the variants originally found in the UK and India. This past month has accounted for 50% of cases, and 25% of deaths.
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Sequence data is not yet released for the new variant, nor is there extensive analysis of whether the variant is more deadly or more vaccine-evading than previous variants.
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Religious events are now banned nationwide, and major cities have closed non-essential business and public parks.
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Stable elimination of COVID-19, which allowed economies to fully reopen, was possible without vaccines, as described in this paper and demonstrated by multiple countries.
The stability of elimination requires restrictions only in regions that had active uncontained outbreaks; uninfected regions can fully open up.
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With (partial) immunity from vaccines, elimination becomes that much easier, as the same restrictions are able to achieve a much faster rate of exponential decline in the number of infections.
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The B1.617.1 variant first found in India, which is now in Victoria, is thought not to be as rapidly transmitting as the B1.617.2 variant that is now dominating in UK.
However, evidence from Australia suggests B1.617.1 is also a much greater challenge to control.
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There are two ways the variant seems different.
The first is a shorter time between being infected and infecting someone else.
"Our contact tracers are identifying and locking down first ring, second ring and third ring contacts within 24 hours.
Argentina imposed new lockdowns with mobility restrictions in most provinces May 22 to control the high surge in COVID-19 cases. Only essential activities are continuing. Social, economic, educational, religious and sports activities are suspended.
Turkey has acheived significant decline in cases using a 17-day lockdown. The biggest drops were seen in Erzincan, Istanbul, Karabük, Ağrı, and Karaman.
Relaxing restrictions should be done by region and not by sector. Vaccination helps but keep cases going down.
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Greece's decline is not nearly as significant. Time to take stronger action.