I'm wondering if the current prevention wisdom will prove to be enough for this new variant.
This article is a nice explainer (short answer: probably not).
I'm wondering if the current prevention wisdom will prove to be enough for this new variant.
overview: if you have a baseline of 10,000 infections per month resulting in 129 deaths, making the strain 50% more deadly but just as contagious results in 193 deaths, but making it just as deadly but 50% more contagious results in 958 deaths.
The reason is that if it turns out to be 50% more contagious, you go from an R of 1.1 to an R of 1.6. Since these are exponential progressions, it means that if you're having a problem with your current measures, making the virus 50% more contagious makes it over 600% more deadly.
The other complication is that it makes vaccination effort more challenging because the percentage who must be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity goes up. If you need 70% to get to herd immunity (a common guess, but nobody actually knows), now you might need 85%. Again, nobody really knows what the threshold is for herd immunity, but it is a function of R.