The U.K. points the way (unfortunately for us)

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried a great article about how the U.K. is reeling from the impact of the new strain of the coronavirus, which was first detected there in September but is now driving a huge increase in new cases and deaths. Early in the article, we find this sentence: “…over the past week, Covid-19 deaths have been running at more than 1,000 a day, a 50% increase from the week before.”

Remember, we’re talking about deaths here; they’ve doubled in one week. And this is a huge number, given their population. The UK has a little bit more than 1/5 of the US population. Since our deaths are running close to 4,000 a day, this means their deaths per population are now about a quarter higher than ours (and of course, given our status as the nation with the highest absolute number of deaths and one of the highest number of deaths per population, that is no mean feat). However, if ours were to double when the UK variant finally becomes widespread (which is inevitable), we would regain our crown of by far the worst-performing large country in the world.

The article focuses on a few neighborhoods in east London, that have been especially hard hit by the new variant. It says “In east London, health officials began to notice something was wrong when, despite a short national lockdown imposed in November, cases kept rising—even when they were falling elsewhere in the country. Large numbers of schoolchildren and teaching staff began testing positive, said Jason Strelitz, the director of public health in Newham. ‘Something different was going on,’ he said. People’s behavior hadn’t changed. ‘The one thing that changed is the strain of the virus.’”

Of course, the big problem with the UK variant is it spreads much more easily than the normal one (which is still by far the most prevalent in the US), even though it’s no more deadly to someone who catches it. But the simple fact that so many more people are getting sick has led to deaths doubling in the UK in one week.

The UK variant is in the US, but still not widespread. Of course, it would be really great to be able to identify all the people infected with the variant in the US and isolate them, to try to keep it under control. That’s certainly not possible now, but we could roll out much more genetic sequencing capability than we have now – and a couple days ago, the CDC finally announced they were doing that.

Better late than never, I guess, but perhaps Trump’s worst legacy (and there’s admittedly some pretty stiff competition for that designation) is that he paid zero attention to the virus after the election (not that he’d done a lot before then, of course, and what he did was mostly counterproductive), and there have been 170,000 additional Covid deaths in that time. A real president would have risen to meet this challenge. As I write this, Trump just left the White House. Good riddance. 

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.