U.S. and Europe Diverge on Managing Pandemic

The U.S. has put all its eggs in the vaccine basket, abandoning behavioral management and concern about variants. 

The only remnant of behavioral management is the CDC notice that while those who have been  vaccinated can do whatever they want, unvaccinated persons are encouraged to wear masks and maintain their social distance. There was a sign to that effect yesterday morning at Lowe's and the parishes have announced they will have similar signs. I went very early to Lowe's garden center to get some things. As planned there were only few people there other than employees. Most everybody was not wearing a mask. I did not wear a mask but had my 'I have been vaccinated" sticker from the health department around my neck. 

Britain has the capacity to figure out virus variants, so obviously they are being very cautious about new ones. Anytime one has capacity it tends to be used. We have less capacity however we appear to have been lucky about the variants. The one that appears to be knocking out all the other ones is not resistant to vaccine. (See second story below).

I am curious about what happens when we get down to the new cases level so that it could be managed by contract tracing. Will we begin to treat it as we do the season flue and not do contact tracing? Will we continue to publish the number of new cases at the county level?  These are important because unless we vaccinate everyone or drive the virus  down to extremely low levels we are always vulnerable to a vaccine resistant strain.

Have we put all our eggs in the vaccine basket because we are individualists who prize  personal responsibility or is it because we are  unwilling to jeopardize economic recovery?       

As Vaccines Turn Pandemic’s Tide, U.S. and Europe Diverge on Path Forward

The split is particularly stark in Britain, which is facing the spread of a new variant, while America has essentially lifted all rules for people who are vaccinated.

LONDON — Over Memorial Day weekend, 135,000 people jammed the oval at the Indianapolis 500. Restaurants across the United States were thronged with customers as mask mandates were being discarded.

The formula, which gained the Biden administration’s blessing, was succinct: In essence, if you are fully vaccinated, you can do as you please.

In Britain, the spread of a new, highly contagious variant first detected in India has scrambled calculations just as the country planned to return to something more like prepandemic life on June 21

Britain has become the world’s most sophisticated laboratory for the virus’s evolution, with 60 percent of England’s coronavirus cases being analyzed through genomic sequencing. That has allowed the country to pick up on the earliest signs of dangerous variants, and made Britain a harbinger of the challenges facing even heavily vaccinated nations as newer versions of the virus reach the unvaccinated.

Since the Delta variant arrived in Britain in March, it has rapidly outspread other versions of the virus, including the very contagious variant first identified in Britain that contributed to deadly waves around the world this winter. That, in turn, has created localized outbreaks that have nudged Covid cases up.

A top scientific adviser to the British government estimated on Friday that the Delta variant was roughly 60 percent more contagious than the earlier one from Britain.

While indoor dining has resumed, most groups larger than six are prohibited, and nightclubs, music venues and large events remain shuttered, leaving many hospitality businesses still reeling. The British government has long targeted June 21 — “freedom day,” in the parlance of the tabloids — as the date when it hoped “to remove all legal limits on social contact.”

In the European Union, where vaccination levels still lag behind those in America and Britain, officials are also being cautious. Germany, France and Austria all moved quickly to bar most visitors from Britain.

Like Britain, the bloc was chastened by a surge of the variant from Britain this winter that contributed to one of the world’s highest death tolls. Governments were hammered for failing to cement the gains of last summer, when lockdowns were lifted across most of Europe.

In the bloc, 47 percent of the adult population has received a first dose, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, but only 23 percent have full protection.

For those reasons, European leaders have said that vigilance is needed, even though infections have fallen about 80 percent since mid-April.

“This progress is fragile,” Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s director in Europe, warned last month. “We have been here before. Let us not make the same mistakes that were made this time last year.”

How the United States Beat the Variants, for Now

The country has managed to avoid a variant-fueled spike in coronavirus cases. Scientists say we were lucky.

Scientists warned that the variants — and B.1.1.7 in particular — might lead to a fourth wave, and that the already strained health care system might buckle.

That didn’t happen. B.1.1.7 did become the predominant version of the virus in the United States, now accounting for nearly three-quarters of all cases. But the surge experts had feared ended up a mere blip in most of the country. The nationwide total of daily new cases began falling in April and has now dropped more than 85 percent from the horrific highs of January.

After B.1.1.7 emerged at the end of December, new variants with combinations of troubling mutations came to light. Scientists fretted about how the competition between the variants might play out.

In January, researchers in California discovered a variant with 10 mutations that was growing more common there and had drifted into other states. Laboratory experiments suggested that the variant could dodge an antibody treatment that had worked well against previous forms of the virus, and that it was perhaps also more contagious.

In the months that have followed, the United States has drastically improved its surveillance of how the variants mutate. Last week more than 28,800 virus genomes, almost 10 percent of all positive test cases, were uploaded to an international online database called GISAID. That clearer picture has enabled scientists to watch how the mutants compete.

The California variant turned out to be a weak competitor, and its numbers dropped sharply in February and March. It is still prevalent in parts of Northern California, but it has virtually disappeared from southern parts of the state and never found a foothold elsewhere in the country. By April 24, it accounted for just 3.2 percent of all virus samples tested in the country, as B.1.1.7 soared to 66 percent.

“B.1.1.7 went in for the knockout, and it’s like, ‘Bye bye, California variant,’” Dr. Andersen said.

On the other side of the country, researchers reported in February that a variant called B.1.526 was spreading quickly in New York and appeared to be a formidable adversary for B.1.1.7. By February, each of those variants had grown to about 35 percent of the samples collected by Dr. Grubaugh’s lab in Connecticut. But B.1.1.7 came out on top.

In fact, B.1.1.7 seems to have the edge over nearly every variant identified so far. At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said B.1.1.7 made up 72 percent of cases in the country.

In Michigan, one of the few states that saw the predicted surge in cases this spring, B.1.1.7 found a hook in younger people who were returning to schools and playing contact sports.

“Because it’s more transmissible, the virus finds cracks in behavior that normally wouldn’t have been as much of a problem,” said Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.

But in the rest of the country, people naturally became more cautious when confronted with the horrifying toll of the virus after the holidays. B.1.1.7 is thought to be about 60 percent more contagious than previous forms of the virus, but its mode of spread is no different. Most states had at least partial restrictions on indoor dining and instituted mask mandates.

“B.1.1.7 is more transmissible, but it can’t jump through a mask,” Dr. Hodcroft said. “So we can still stop its spread.”