Don’t be complacent about COVID Delta — Lessons from the UK

The UK has advised that the dominant strain of COVID is the Delta variant — the same variant that generated a huge spike in India’s covid numbers

There’s abolutely no doubting the seriousness of this variant. The rate of COVID is now 4x higher in the UK than at the end of April.

Lets look at this chart just for the last 3 months. It makes it a lot clearer.

With 80% of the population having received at least one dose, and 60% fully vaccinated, the fatality rate has been low during this period — but not zero. Lets take a look at this in whole numbers:

Currently averaging 11 deaths per day (7 day average) — up from 5 deaths per day in late May.

While UK has done a great job in deploying the vaccine to over 80% of the population this shows that the new variant is potentially very serious — especially to those who have not been vaccinated.

Lets take a look at the US on the same basis as the chart above:

Did you notice that the UK has approximately 8,000 new cases per day — on a population of 67m — whereas the US has 11,000 on a population of 326m (almost 5x that of the UK).

We know that the US has fully vaccinated 45% of the population (less than the UK). If the Delta variant takes hold in the US as it did in the UK — our downward trajectory could be halted.

Stated another way — with the current level of vaccine rate in the US — Delta has a greater opportunity to make an adverse impact on our recovery.

The longer we let the virus exist — the greater the possibility of more lethal and more widely transmissible variants get created.

While everyone has to make their own decision over getting vaccinated — I’m grateful that so many have. The more that do — the harder we make it for new variants to take hold.

Originally published at http://jf-insights.com on June 21, 2021.