Cases and hospitalisations are rising again across much of the western world.
What’s driving the rise, and should we be worried?
What’s behind the rise?
Some blame governments dropping restrictions, but the answer is the same as always: it’s the virus. Specifically the BA.2 Omicron strain.
Here are UK hospitalisations, split by variant. That mystery resurgence? Not so mysterious with this context added.
And when the virus changes the narrative, it doesn’t just change it in one country, it changes it everywhere.
Here’s same chart, but for Europe & US.
It’s the same story. What looked like mystery double-peaks are now clearly a BA.1 peak followed by BA.2.
And for those of you in the US looking at that last chart and saying "what resurgence? everything seems fine here", here’s a closer look at what’s happening beneath the surface of that apparently flat trend.
We’ve been here before, and I think we know what happens next by now...
So, BA.2’s transmissibility advantage over BA.1 is driving the resurgence.
Next question: should we be worried?
The good news here is that analysis by @UKHSA has found that:
So while a resurgence is never good news, BA.2 is Omicron just as BA.1 was, so we have a decent idea of what that looks like in terms of severe disease & death
The BA.2 wave will still cause deaths, but with high levels of immunity, the tolls will be dwarfed by pre-vaccine waves
We can also revisit those earlier charts:
Denmark & Netherlands are already descending from BA.2 peaks, so we know that what goes up, comes down.
The height of BA.2 peaks varies. Denmark’s piggy-backed on BA.1 and rose higher. Netherlands came after and reached a similar height
Lots of factors will affect the specifics in any given country, including levels of immunity and mixing behaviour.
On that latter point, most of us have been taking things a little easier in recent weeks, with behaviour shifting back towards pre-pandemic norms.
The number of people working remotely, avoiding large indoor gatherings etc, is at or near an all-pandemic low across western Europe
And it’s a similar story in most countries in terms of masks and total numbers of close-contacts, both of which are about as close to 2019 levels as they have been, or heading that way fast.
So while the coming BA.2 wave shouldn’t be a crisis for any country with high immunity levels, it does perhaps serve as a useful illustration of where we (well-vaccinated countries) are with Covid now, two-and-a-bit years into the pandemic:
Vaccine rollouts have been enormous successes, immunity levels are high. As a result, any given Omicron infection has a similar fatality risk as seasonal flu, and we’re mixing indoors again. In that sense we’re as close to 2019 as we have ever been
What BA.2 is demonstrating is that we’re still in a very different infectious disease environment to where we were before Covid.
To be clear, I don’t say this to worry anyone: I say it in the hope that that people are *less* surprised/worried when this and future waves unfold.
As @ewanbirney put it to us, before Covid we had 4 coronaviruses circulating in the population. Now we have 5, and the 5th is especially transmissible.
As @zorinaq shows below, that means we get more waves of Covid in any given year than we got flu waves
So, as we showed in our story last week, despite Covid being less lethal than it has ever been, the overall risk of infection, post-viral syndrome (long-Covid), severe disease and death remains markedly higher than it was in 2019
Our behaviour continues to trend towards 2019 levels. For many people, life feels quite normal, and I’m the last person who would say "you can never go back to normal! precautions forever!"
But in terms of infectious disease environment, this *is* a new normal, not the old one.
Ultimately, the questions — not only with BA.2, but with Covid more broadly in the months & years ahead — are what Covid’s typical annual toll on public health will be, whether we fully appreciate this, and whether we (and our healthcare systems) are resourced for the new normal.
Finally, I just want to touch on another issue that I think BA.2 highlights:
Throughout the pandemic there has been a tendency to try to explain the virus’ dynamics by pointing to nice neat explanations around government policy. Mask mandates, dropping isolation etc.
While those things certainly have impacts, there are two things to note:
• First, they pale into significance compared to the impact of new variants, whose emergence we have relatively little control over. Not everything can be blamed on a person/policy
• And second, despite two years of evidence to the contrary, we continue to attribute to policy what is better understood as people making independent decisions in response to the status of the pandemic, with policy being just one influence.
NEW: my column this week is about the coming vibe shift, from Boomers vs Millennials to huge wealth inequality *between* Millennials.
Current discourse centres on how the average Millennial is worse-off than the average Boomer was, but the richest millennials are loaded 💸🚀
That data was for the UK, but it’s a similar story in the US. The gap between the richest and poorest Millennials is far wider than it was for Boomers. More debt at the bottom, and much more wealth at the top.
In both countries, inequality is overwhelmingly *within* generations, not between them.
And how have the richest millennials got so rich?
Mainly this: enormous wealth transfers from their parents, typically to help with buying their first home.
In the UK, among those who get parental help, the top 10% got *£170,000* towards their house (the average Millennial got zero).
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.
Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.
People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.
High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.
The politics of America’s housing issues in one chart:
• People and politicians in blue states say they care deeply about the housing crisis and homelessness but keep blocking housing so both get worse
• Red states simply permit loads of new homes and have no housing crisis
And if you were wondering where London fits into this...
It builds even less than San Francisco, and its house prices have risen even faster.
That cities like London & SF (and the people who run them) are considered progressive while overseeing these situations is ... something
Those charts are from my latest column, in which I argue that we need to stop talking about the housing crisis, and start talking about the planning/permitting crisis, because it’s all downstream from that ft.com/content/de34df…
NEW: we often talk about an age divide in politics, with young people much less conservative than the old.
But this is much more a British phenomenon than a global one.
40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020. But only 10% of UK under-30s support the Conservatives. Why?
One factor is that another narrative often framed as universal turns out to be much worse in the UK: the sense that young generations are getting screwed.
Young people are struggling to get onto the housing ladder in many countries, but the crisis is especially deep in Britain:
It’s a similar story for incomes, where Millennials in the UK have not made any progress on Gen X, while young Americans are soaring to record highs.
Young Brits have had a much more visceral experience of failing to make economic progress.