COVID-19 Is a 2021 Disease
Due to its swift vaccination campaign, the United States has managed to dodge this phenomenon. However, while swift, vaccinations must continue in order to ensure our immunity is robust.
The Counterpoint is a free newsletter that uses both analytic and holistic thinking to examine the wider world. My goal is that you find it ‘worth reading’ rather than it necessarily ‘being right.’ Expect regular updates on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as well as essays on a variety of topics. I appreciate any and all sharing or subscriptions.
Editor’s Note: My wife and I are in the middle of our cross-country move from Los Angeles to Maryland. Afterward, we are going on our delayed-by-a-year honeymoon. Bear with me, regular posting will resume July 1st. I’ve built up quite a few idea for posts over this break!
There were 1,808,116 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in 2020. As of today, there have been 1,926,6811 confirmed deaths in 2021. Through only five months and nine days of 2021, COVID-19 has already killed more people than in 2020.
The United States has managed to avoid this due to our swift vaccination campaign with highly-effective mRNA vaccines. Confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-19 are at all-time lows within the US. The seven-day averages are 15,103 cases and 441 deaths.
Credit must be given to researchers such as Dr. Katalin Kariko and Dr. Ugur Sahin (and many others) for spending years developing this technology, the Trump administration for initiating and funding Operation Warp Speed, the Biden administration for directing and accelerating vaccine distribution and messaging, and the countless public health and health care professionals for doing the boots-on-the-ground work of getting shots in arms.
The cases and deaths that are still occurring are heavily concentrated in three populations:
Countries with low total vaccination rates. Examples include India and Brazil.
Countries with high total vaccination rates but who prioritized not-very-effective vaccines (such as China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines). Examples include Bahrain and Chile.
For the United States, it’s this last population that is cause for concern. While the US vaccination campaign was swift, it cannot be considered fully robust. While 42.3% of the total US population is fully vaccinated, there is a large variance in vaccination between states. Below is a chart of the five most-vaccinated and five least-vaccinated states.
The concern is that a ~33% vaccination rate will not be robust enough to stop the latest variant, B.1.167.2. In the previous update, we covered how B.1.617.2 was displacing B.1.1.7 as the dominant variant in both India and the United Kingdom. This same displacement is now being observed in the United States and other countries. All four variants-of-concern, their location of first identification, and exact mutations can be found here.
Dr. Shane Crotty, virologist at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, has an excellent thread summarizing B.1.617.2 below:
While B.1.167.2 is deeply concerning we have the tools to stop it. Frankly, it is not good that this variant is more transmissible than already-more-transmissible variants, exhibits significant antibody evasion, and can infect those with only one dose of an mRNA vaccine. All that being said, we know how to suppress viral transmission (masks and ventilation), antibodies are only one aspect of our immune response, and most importantly, our mRNA vaccines work amazing well, even against B.1.167.2, after the full, two-dose regiment.
Will a ~33% vaccination rate be enough to control viral transmission in low-vaccination states? Summer seasonality effects combined with naturally-acquired and vaccination-derived immunity should keep COVID-19 essentially non-existent throughout summer. But the majority of the world remains unvaccinated and global travel continues to return to pre-pandemic levels. B.1.167.2 will continue to spread in coming months and when winter weather, i.e. much better conditions for viral transmission, returns, will the immunity within the United States be strong enough to contain the more-transmissible variants in majority un-vaccinated states without mask mandates? I don’t know.
But what I do know with certainty is that the simplest and easiest way to truly end this pandemic is to schedule your vaccinations or encourage or help someone else schedule theirs. Together, we can stop SAR-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
I’ve waited a few days to write this as Peru dropped a backlog of ~120,000 deaths on June 3rd. It’s unclear to me when these deaths occurred. Even if you assume all these occurred in 2020, global 2021 deaths would still surpass 2020 deaths by the end of June.