They show that increases in European Delta COVID can be controlled

In the last two weeks, Delta has had a variant of coronavirus it frustrated hopes Many Americans are eager to celebrate the “hot summer” and the end of the pandemic.

As a health expert he warned in June, the highly contagious Delta variant has hit particularly hard in states with low vaccination rates, filling hospitals and mortuaries back to some of the darkest days of the pandemic. And unlike previous variants, the new data suggest that some people infected with the Delta vaccine – although fully protected from serious disease – may spread the virus to others. This is what the CDC has advised people who get vaccinated in areas with higher viral transmission should start wearing masks in indoor public spaces.

Big questions still remain The extent to which the Delta is spreading “progressive” cases. But there is a growing fear that Delta will be an unstoppable force today.

However, the message from experts watching Delta waves in Europe is more gratifying, and suggests that the traditional rulebook still applies: vaccinations and masking and avoiding crowds in public can reduce the number of cases.

Meanwhile, some observers have done it look at what happened With the Delta in the UK and India, where the variant was first found, and speculated that it could be the misery of the US Delta. at least be of short duration, which we do to limit its spread. In both countries, after the large increase in cases was similar to the decline, the expanding Delta variant suggests that it usually burns fairly quickly.

This approach has two major problems. First, if we let the Delta make its way, the cost of life and overcrowded hospitals will be high.

“On the way to that, the number of hospitalizations would be catastrophic,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a computational epidemiologist and director at the University of Texas at Austin. UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, he told BuzzFeed News. “You would overwhelm your health care system.”

Secondly, if we look at the diversity of Delta curves seen across Europe, it is very far from the fact that there is a fast Delta wave. And in these countries, which have seen a rapid rise and fall, changes in people’s behavior — rather than the inherent characteristics of the Delta variant — seem to be a big part of what has turned things around.

Go deeper into the reasons behind the different Delta waves seen across Europe, and a more hopeful message will emerge: While it’s scary, the Delta variant seems controllable. The vaccine is our best weapon, but the modest measures of social distance that have worked against other less transmissible forms of coronavirus can still help a lot.

It doesn’t make much sense to compare Indian Ocean wave disaster With experts from the US, the UK and other European countries, experts say. Not only the vast population of India largely without insertion at the time the Delta variant destroyed the country in April and May, but as surveillance and testing were so incomplete, it is not clear whether the recorded curves of the new cases accurately reflect how many people were infected.

But if you look at the Delta waves seen so far in European nations and the US, the curves are very different. In the graph above, only the UK and the Netherlands show a rapid rise and fall, while the others have seen a slower rise. In Germany, the Delta curve is almost non-existent.

Although the United Kingdom was under the influence of the Delta variant before others, largely due to those traveling to India and India, the time when the Delta established its dominance cannot explain the differences from the other nations shown.

It is very difficult to distinguish the exact reasons for the differences between the Delta waves of European nations. But transmission will depend on the number of people with some immunity – either through the vaccine or through a previous coronavirus infection – and it will depend on the patterns of behavior that drive the spread.

Among the countries shown, France has the lowest vaccination rate, as 49% of its population is fully vaccinated (slightly ahead of the US, 50%). Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has the highest rate, with 57.3% of the population fully vaccinated. The rest of the European nations shown are very narrow between 53.2% and 54.2%. Thus, the size of the vaccine does not appear to explain the large differences seen in the Delta curves of nations.

One clue that the differences in people’s behavior have played a big role is that Germany has kept up stricter controls of social distance Rather than most European residents, people who do not live together are required to wear medical masks on 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) and on public transport and in shops.

Looking at the two nations that have seen a rapid rise and fall in the cases caused by the Delta variant, on the other hand, it gives strong indications that large crowds played a tremendous role in each of these waves.

The rise of the UK seems to have accelerated Euro 2020 football tournament, fans gathered in pubs and homes to watch the matches. In England and Scotland, the rise in new cases increased markedly in a week or two, after the respective teams had played their first matches, each team was relegated and returned in a couple of weeks.

The Scottish team was initially eliminated. But in England, which reached the finals, the clock festivities continued until July 11th.

The timing of the ensuing peaks was what epidemiologists expected if rallies to watch the matches would push the Delta waves hard. “It takes two weeks for a signal to appear in the data without hesitation,” Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK, told BuzzFeed News.

Unlike previous rises in the UK, the cases were dominated by men, in line with the demographics of those who watched the matches. And a new study Scotland’s Public Health reinforces the idea that the UK’s summit is prominent, largely driven by a breakdown in social distance at parties to watch tournaments. “At the peak, more than half of the cases reported in Scotland went to a EURO 2020 event or were closely related to someone who attended,” the researchers noted.

Most of those infected were relatively young and did not become seriously ill. This, along with the rapid progress the UK has made with the vaccine in recent months, saw the peak of hospitalization lower than the fifth seen in the UK in January, at the height of the waves with the Alpha variant. And although COVID deaths have risen slightly, only around 90 people are currently dying from the disease in the UK, compared to more than 1,200 at the peak of the Alpha wave.

The rapid turnaround in the UK has confused some experts who hoped the “After Freedom Day” infection would rise to new heights on July 19, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson removed the rest of the coronavirus restrictions in England, allowing pubs and restaurants to function normally and remove them. mask all conditions.

While Neil Ferguson’s disease model at Imperial College London announced new cases it can rise to 200,000 a day, the seven-day average number of new cases was less than 50,000 around Freedom Day before it began to fall. In recent days, the decline in the number of cases seems to have flattened, and it is not clear where the UK Delta wave goes.

The other European country with a rapid rise and fall in cases is the Netherlands. Within 10 days of the Dutch government removing almost all other coronavirus restrictions on June 26, cases began to grow. “It was really the culmination of cases among young people,” Tom Wenseleers, a biostatistician and evolutionary biologist at Leuven Catholic University in Belgium, told BuzzFeed News. As in the UK, this did not lead to a significant increase in hospitalizations or deaths.

However, on July 9, the nation suddenly reversed its path, closed nightclubs and restricted the seating to bars and restaurants to a distance of 1.5 meters. “Most of the infections have occurred in nightclubs and at large crowded parties,” the Dutch government said. in a statement announcing new restrictions.

The Dutch Delta wave hit two new restrictions two weeks later. Especially if this quick turnaround has been driven by the closure of nightclubs, it gives another encouraging message that the Delta variant can be contained through more subtle behavioral changes than the whole lock.

“The UK and the Netherlands should have advice against despair,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t have to be fatalistic with the Delta variant.”

Hanage is not the only one who believes that the experience of European countries suggests that modest measures such as wearing masks in indoor public spaces and avoiding large gatherings can make a big difference compared to the Delta variant.

“When behaviors change, with or without official policy changes, just as it protects you from infections, we see these kinds of changes,” Meyers said.

The graph above shows that states with lower vaccination rates tend to have more severe Delta waves so far.

So in the long run, promoting the vaccine in places where few people have been shot remains the best hope for defeating the Delta variant in the U.S. But while vaccination rates increasing rapidly Today, in the states that are suffering the most severe rises in the Delta, there is a long way to go, and people who receive their first shot today will not have strong protection for a few weeks.

Asked at a White House press conference on Thursday what the U.S. should do to deal with the Delta waves, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted that the controls that helped reverse the previous rise would work again.

“Right now you’re doing it in an immediate sense of relief,” Fauci said. “Mitigation is one of the things you’ve heard from the CDC’s recommendations, in terms of masking, to avoid crowded situations where you may have a greater ability to spread the virus.”

“The last game of all of this is vaccination,” Fauci added. But if the U.S. can ease the spread in the short term and increase vaccination rates in the long run, he said, “We will reverse the rise of the delta. I can assure you that will happen.”