Another take. Sounds like we'll find out how bad it is compared to the UK variant in time.
Studies Examine Variant Surging in California, and the News Isn’t Good
Not too worried. If anything, this is good news, since we seem to be on a downward trend in infections, near the fall low, for the time being. As long as that continues all is well (whether it will...well, very hard to predict). I
expect it'll probably level out shortly. But I
hope that cases continue to decline to all-time lows (below 2000 a day).
Still not clear exactly why this is happening. My pet theory is: pockets of near herd immunity in the disadvantaged communities, while sheltered communities continue to shelter (and probably still will until they are vaccinated I would guess - why would they risk otherwise?). Combine with vaccination, and you see these declines, due to "effective" herd immunity. I also think cutting off the nexus of spread in hospitals & LTCFs and their workers with vaccination is a stronger effect than might be imagined (offset by the currently sheltered and not at-risk communities hogging the remainder of the vaccines, of course).
Assuming the vaccines continue to work well (which seems likely):
I think the "new" mortality is mostly over in California (after about two months when most of the people in long-term hospital stays die). I expect us to drop to below ~20 deaths per day by mid-April. Driven by decline in case numbers and vaccination of the vulnerable.
Hoping the same applies nationwide. Still having a hard time reconciling Fauci and the Biden Administration's pessimistic projections of July for the "end" or Christmas for "normal" vs. what I think is going to happen. I think I understand the various ways it could end up playing out in a way different than I expect (bad assumptions)...but I still think that:
Given the "entrenched" sheltering taking place in communities which have not been heavily impacted, and the basic changes to human behavior on average (unrelated to mandates or regulations) I suspect that R0 for the virus can't exceed 2 right now. (There's very high spread on that number of course depending on the community, etc.)
So that means herd immunity threshold of 50%. Which is far lower than I think is being assumed. Obviously it's a "fragile" and unstable herd immunity (because it is dependent on people's behavior remaining altered), but I do think this is going to drive continued drop in cases. And there's a positive feedback loop of mitigation and suppression measures (tracing, isolating, better testing coverage, etc.) which will start to become more effective if we can get the numbers low enough (I think we'd need less than 5-10k cases per day nationwide for that effect to become really strong).
I guess we'll see. Lots of assumptions that can go the wrong way, and it's pretty easy to end up on the wrong side of the exponential.
