The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week).

This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot of talk early on indicating that the coronavirus didn’t seem to mutate readily. So much for that idea. It just needed a critical mass to start mutating regularly, as found in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, and even NY and California).

The most striking fact mentioned in the story, in my opinion, was that “…the majority of people in the hospital with coronavirus in the hot spot of Bolton, in northwest England, were eligible for a vaccine but hadn’t taken it.” Note that Britain is about where we are in terms of vaccinations: just around 34% of the population is fully vaccinated – yet infections by the Indian variant doubled in the last five days.

And Britain is also facing the same sort of resistance that the US is facing, in terms of getting everyone vaccinated. So if you’re a virus skeptic, I suggest you consider the experience of Bolton. Because you can be sure the Indian variant is in the US, and it still has plenty of ripe, unvaccinated targets. That would be you.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for May 16.

Month	Deaths reported during month	Avg. deaths per day during period	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept.	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct.	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov.	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec.	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,064	3,163	123%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March	72,693	2,345	105%
Month of April	47,593	1,598	66%
Total Pandemic so far	600,213	1,358

 

I. Total deaths

Average deaths last seven days: 573

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.7%

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases as of yesterday: 33,722,409

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 237,349 (= 33,907/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.7%  

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