Now it’s Australia’s turn to teach a terrible lesson

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The June 30 WSJ ran a very scary article about a country that up until now had seemed to be a success story for containing Covid: Australia. Even though they still have a very low number of cases by the standards of the rest of the world, they’re rapidly rising (the same can be said of most of Asia – Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Malysia, and some others. They were all wonderful success stories…until they weren’t). The article started with this passage:

SYDNEY—The exchange, captured by CCTV camera, lasted only seconds.

A limousine driver, unknowingly infected with the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, and another man passed close to one another at an indoor mall near Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Both stood near each other for a short time, and one of them appeared to move through the airspace the other had occupied. The brief interaction was enough for the second man to contract the coronavirus.

Think about this: During a brief and moving encounter of only seconds, one man infected another. Do you remember that, early in the pandemic, we were told that it would take 10-15 minutes breathing the air of an infected person to become infected yourself? That was true – with the Alpha variant. Now we’re in the Delta world (Delta was originally known as the Indian variant), which is completely different. Delta is rapidly taking over the world, and yesterday the CDC announced that it was now the number one variant in the US.

Here’s Australia’s problem: They’ve been very successful at widespread testing, jumping on every new case, quarantining each infected person, tracing their contacts, and quarantining the contacts as well. Their secret sauce (and that of most of Asia, learned the hard way during the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the H1N1 outbreak in 2009) was the contact tracing and quarantining of contacts – something we never even deployed against Covid in the US, since by the time we had a large testing capacity, it was far too late to be successful with contact tracing.

But guess what? When the virus spreads in seconds, not minutes, one person can infect a lot of others very quickly. The article tells of a birthday party in Sydney that infected 27 people.

What about vaccinations? Well, Australia – again, like most of Asia except China – has been very slow to vaccinate, because there didn’t seem to be any particular reason to hurry. Better to wait a while for the price to go down or something like that. So now they’re scrambling, but they’ve got a long way to go. Hence the lockdowns.

So what does the Delta variant mean for the US? It means that, if you’re not vaccinated, you’re a sitting duck. Last week, every Covid death in Maryland was of a non-vaccinated person. That will keep happening until either a) almost everybody is vaccinated, or b) everybody who isn’t vaccinated has either died or has survived the infection – known as getting your immunity the hard way. It doesn’t seem like a very hard choice to make, in my opinion.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, June 6.

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	98,604	3,181	119%
Month of Feb.	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March	37,945	1,224	55%
Month of April	24,323	811	64%
Month of May	19,843	661	82%
Month of June	10,544	351	53%
Total Pandemic so far	621,303	1,265

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Average deaths last seven days: 234

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 34,603,583

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 621,303 (= 14,621/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3%  

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