![]() ![]() But transmission will depend on the number of people with some immunity - either through vaccination or prior coronavirus infection - and patterns of behavior that encourage spread. It’s very difficult to tease apart the exact reasons for the differences between European nations’ Delta waves. While the UK was exposed to the Delta variant before the others, largely due to people traveling to and from India, the timing with which Delta established its dominance can’t explain the differences for the other nations shown. In Germany, the Delta curve is barely a blip. In the chart above, only the UK and the Netherlands show a quick rise and fall, while the others have experienced a slower rise. Not only was India’s vast population largely unvaccinated at the time the Delta variant devastated the country in April and May, but surveillance and testing were so incomplete that it’s unclear whether the recorded curve of new cases accurately reflects how many people got infected.īut if you look at the Delta waves seen so far in European nations and the US, the curves are very different. It doesn’t make much sense to compare India’s catastrophic Delta wave with those in the US, the UK, and other European countries, experts say. Vaccination is our best weapon, but the modest social distancing measures that have worked against other, less transmissible forms of the coronavirus can still help in a big way. And in those countries that have seen a rapid rise and fall, changes in people’s behavior - rather than the inherent characteristics of the Delta variant - seem to be a big part of what has turned things around.ĭig deeper into the reasons behind the different Delta waves seen across Europe, and a more hopeful message emerges: Scary as it is, the Delta variant seems to be controllable. ![]() Second, if you look at the diversity of the Delta curves seen across Europe, it is far from clear that there is a typical fast-burning Delta wave. “You would overwhelm your healthcare system.” “On the way to that point, there would be a catastrophic number of hospitalizations,” Lauren Ancel Meyers, a computational epidemiologist at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, told BuzzFeed News. First, if we simply let Delta take its course, the cost in lives and overburdened hospitals will be high. ![]() There are two big problems with this view. In both countries, a steep rise in cases was followed by a similarly rapid decline, suggesting that the fast-spreading Delta variant typically burns itself out fairly quickly. Meanwhile, some observers have looked at what happened with Delta in the UK and India, where the variant was first discovered, and speculated that the US’s Delta misery may at least be short-lived, whatever we do to limit its spread. Yet the message from experts who are watching Delta waves in Europe is more encouraging, suggesting that the usual rulebook still applies: Vaccination and strategies like masking indoors in public and avoiding crowds can keep case numbers down. But there is now a growing sense of dread that Delta will be an unstoppable force. This has led the CDC to advise that vaccinated people in areas with higher viral transmission should resume wearing masks in indoor public spaces.īig questions still remain about the extent to which “breakthrough” cases are spreading Delta. And unlike with previous variants, new data suggests that some vaccinated people who get infected with Delta - while overwhelmingly protected against severe disease - can still spread the virus to others. In the past couple of weeks, the Delta coronavirus variant has dashed the hopes of many Americans looking forward to celebrating a “hot vax summer” and the end of the pandemic.Īs health experts warned in June, the highly contagious Delta variant has hit especially hard in states with low rates of vaccination, filling hospitals and morgues yet again in a return to some of the pandemic’s darkest days.
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