54 thoughts on “COVID summer ’21”

  21. This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded them off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. It stumbled into the normality trap, craving a return to the carefree days of 2019; in May, after the CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, President Joe Biden gave a speech that felt like a declaration of victory. Three months later, cases and hospitalizations are rising, indoor masking is back, and schools and universities are opening uneasily—again. “It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.

    But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.” In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus had a basic reproduction number, or R0, of 2 to 3, meaning that each infected person spreads it to two or three people. Those are average figures: In practice, the virus spread in uneven bursts, with relatively few people infecting large clusters in super-spreading events. But the CDC estimates that Delta’s R0 lies between 5 and 9, which “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. At that level, “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said.

    In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/delta-has-changed-pandemic-endgame/619726/

  26. Whatever role the Olympics played, the pandemic has worsened dramatically since they ended on 8 August. Tokyo has reported a record daily caseload – 5,773 last Friday – as have Osaka and other prefectures. Nationwide, new daily cases averaged 20,307 a day this week, up from 14,729 last week, according to the health ministry.

    More than 80% of critical care beds in the capital are occupied and serious cases are at record highs. In response, the government has extended and expanded a virus state of emergency until after the Paralympics, and said only coronavirus patients in serious condition should be admitted to hospital, with those exhibiting mild symptoms told to recuperate at home.

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/21/olympic-feelgood-factor-evaporates-as-fearful-tokyo-braces-for-paralympics

  28. President Joe Biden just got some deeply unwelcome news: The pandemic that he was elected to end could drag on deep into a midterm election year, with all the political and economic destruction that could bring.

    The warning by the government’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that the crisis won’t be under control until spring of next year — and even then, it will need most American vaccine skeptics to change their minds — came as a severe jolt to a weary nation.
    It also meant that Biden’s best-laid plans of triumphing over the pandemic and riding an economic wave into the campaign for congressional election results in November next year now look at risk.

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/politics/anthony-fauci-timeline-covid-joe-biden/index.html

  41. A COVID Surge Is Overwhelming U.S. Hospitals, Raising Fears Of Rationed Care

    The U.S. health care system is again buckling under the weight of a COVID-19 surge that has filled more than 100,000 hospital beds nationwide and forced some states to consider enacting “crisis standards of care” — a last resort plan for rationing medical care during a catastrophic event.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/05/1034210487/covid-surge-overwhelming-hospitals-raising-fears-rationed-care

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