'This is the movie we all never wanted to see again,' explains EricTopol to dwallacewells about COVID's Delta wave
Nurses check on a patient in the COVID ICU at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California on Wednesday. Photo: Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group via Getty Images At present, there are two big anchors to conventional-wisdom thinking on the Delta variant: that those already vaccinated remain exceedingly well protected against the new, more transmissible strain; and that those who aren’t remain exceedingly vulnerable.
Americans fretting about our vaccination rates often point to those two countries as models, but, as with pandemic performance before the vaccines, when it comes to vaccine rollout we may be less far behind our peers than we tell ourselves. Israel has fully vaccinated 58.4 percent of its population, and about 90 percent of those over the age of 60. In England, 53 percent of its total population fully vaccinated, and 94 percent of its over-50s. The U.S.
In the U.K. today, there are about 47,000 new cases , and while it is the case that death totals in the coming weeks will likely grow, at the moment the country’s seven-day rolling death total is, according to Our World in Data, just 55.
I think overall you’ve got it pegged, but I would modulate some of that. Right now about 85 percent infections are with Delta. We’re not at 99, but we will be probably in a week. And then we’ll be there for several weeks. So we’re going to have a Delta wave that comes to go through just like it did India. But eventually, as the Delta wave proceeds, it will start to come down — it’s starting to come down, perhaps, in the U.K.
The age skew for hospitalizations, while dramatic, isn’t as dramatic as the age skew for mortality. I think, according to the CDC, mortality risk is 600 times as high for someone in their 80s than someone in their 20s; for hospitalization, it’s just a 15-fold increase. Right, though of course none of the vaccines were tested, in clinical trials, to measure their efficacy in preventing transmission.
And now we’re talking about younger people dying, predominantly. These are all catastrophes, even those who don’t die — prolonged hospitalizations and all that goes along with that. So, no, I wouldn’t want to say that I’m not concerned about these other hospitalizations and deaths — we will see them. They just won’t be like the monster third wave.Hopefully like you alluded to, one tenth as bad, 90 percent less mortality. That would probably be the best case scenario.
So even with the new research about the high viral loads, suggesting Delta producing ten thousand times more virus than the previous strains, your intuition is that the virulence is in the same neighborhood as the other variants, is that right? Not dramatically different? I think we are seeing small evidence of the stage that people are getting scared in Missouri and Arkansas and are lining up to get vaccinated. But the numbers aren’t big. We’re probably at 500,000 doses a day total, and we were at four and a half million a day in March and April.
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